[OSM-talk] [Talk-us] Slack

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 03/29/2016 07:33 PM, Luis Villa wrote:
> +1 to this. OSM should be seeking to broaden the base of potential
> mappers, and that means making sure that gateways to the community are
> user-friendly - which these days includes good UX/onboarding experience
> and mobile apps. Slack is a clear winner there.

As a side note, this is also something commonly debated by the OSMF
board and the OSMF members - wheter or not, and in how far, non-free
tools are valid to use for a project like OSM and a foundation like the
OSMF.

Example of a recent discussion:
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/osmf-talk/2015-December/003639.html

The spectrum of available services for a specific task usually ranges
from "Non-free software offered as a service" (with and without silo,
with and without payment) over "free software offered as a serivce" to
"free software you run yourselves".

The paid-for solutions will usually mean less work for the few admins at
OSMF (who have enough work with keeping the essentials running), plus
they're usually shinier. The self-hosted stuff is often less shiny but
more in keeping with the free-and-open spirit.

Personally I'm often on the fence as well. I'd love there to be an
"internal IT services working group" whom we could task with setting up
email, bug trackers, wikis, mumble servers, and voting platforms as
needed but there's no such group and not enough capacity in OWG to
shoulder that too. I think that OSM owes its success partly to all those
who were happy to use it when it was still much less usable than it is
today; had everyone gone to Google because the had the slickest
interface, then OSM wouldn't be where it is today. On the other hand,
working groups or the board tend to have a mission and while some
detours for using free-and-open are acceptable, there's a limit to just
how much productivity loss you can accept for going with the less shiny.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"