[Talk-us] Forums/email lists for OSM Discussions

[stevea]

Shawn K. Quinn <skquinn at rushpost.com> wrote:
> Not quoted, but I saw the mention of Jitsi / Jitsi Meet in the thread as
> well. How hard would it be to hack/repurpose an IRC daemon and client to
> make our own analog to Slack?

I have mentioned Jitsi in the context of this subject, but I’m not sure this thread (it was tangential to this thread on a private email to A. McCann, OSMF Secretary).  Mentioned was OSM’s “Big Blue Button” ([1], instance of web teleconferencing software) and that I might use that INSTEAD of jitsi.  I clarified with that the only reason I mentioned jitsi was to make a clear distinction between Zoom (as relatively well-known commercial software that happens to be proprietary) and jitsi (as similarly-featured software that is open).  I haven’t used Big Blue Button in the context of doing videoconferencing as OSM collaboration, but if I ever find myself needing to do that, I’m grateful it is available to the greater (global) OSM community.

I’m hearing “we’ve been talking about this for the last five years…” so I realize there is some exasperation on this topic.  Still, I’m cheered to see it being discussed, as the topic is important (including both my opinion and based on feedback here; I’m not the only one who feels Slack is “too closed,” so let’s “do open").  I don’t know what any eventual technical solution may be (I have hopes that Discourse can gain some traction and even rally), but I feel it important we continue to beat this drum.  Apologies if you’ve heard it all before.

SteveA

[1] https://wiki.osm.org/wiki/BigBlueButton