[OSM-talk] OSM US Trails Working Group

[stevea]

Thank you, Eugene.  I’m taking a look now, further into the week (it’s bedtime Sunday night where I am).

While it might be a step backwards for reasons you state (“being discussed in the OSM US Slack group”), it also seems like two steps forwards towards a “more neutral” (OAuth2-permission / credential based) messaging / collaboration platform.  It does appear that Discourse itself is GNU GPL v2, which I take as a positive sign in the right direction.

SteveA

> On Oct 10, 2021, at 10:27 PM, Eugene Alvin Villar <seav80 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi SteveA,
> 
> You might want to participate in the ongoing work to set up a Discourse instance for OSM. This has integrated SSO with your OSM account (via OAuth2) and is targeted to potentially replace the existing OSM forum, mailing lists, and OSM Q&A website.
> 
> The test instance is here: https://community.openstreetmap.org/
> 
> Some documentation about it is here: https://files.osmfoundation.org/apps/onlyoffice/s/KwYSgL7LSynDPtH
> 
> Unfortunately, most of the people working on this initiative are discussing it in the OSM US Slack group. :/
> 
> ~Eugene
> 
> 
> On Mon, Oct 11, 2021 at 3:09 AM stevea <steveaOSM at softworkers.com> wrote:
> > On Sat, Oct 9, 2021 at 9:55 AM Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:
> > whichever medium you choose you'll exclude some people who refuse to use it. As long as it remains informal and you're not later told "this was agreed on Slack" I guess it's ok.
> 
> > On Sat, October 9, 2021 at 12:06:17 PM PDT Zeke Farwell <ezekielf at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Absolutely.  Currently the number of US mappers active on Slack is far greater than those active on this mailing list.  So Slack is currently the inclusive place for discussions to happen among the US mapper community.  Despite the smaller number of active subscribers on this list, I did think it was important to post a message here as well in case there were interested folks who aren't also on Slack.  To really cover all the bases I would need to post on the OpenStreetMap Reddit, Discord, Telegram, forum, and probably other places as well. 
> 
> While the effect I might create here and now by posting feels to be likely quite minimal, I feel compelled to say so anyway:  please allow me to express my disappointment in what I see as the more-and-more widespread use of non-open (proprietary, commercial) methods of communication in OSM.
> 
> I have referred to Slack as a "secret sauce walkie-talkie" before and do not use it at all, neither for OSM communication / collaboration nor any other purpose.  Why?  Because it seems (to me, obviously not others) that something proprietary and requiring a legal agreement with an onerous license (UNlike ODbL which is sensible and not onerous) is inconsistent with the spirit of OSM.  That said, it does appear that many use Slack for OSM collaboration, and because I appear to be a "refusenik" regarding Slack, I miss out on what is communicated via its closed platform.  Frederick is correct ("whichever medium you choose you'll exclude some people..."), but he doesn't have to be correct forever in this regard.
> 
> I get a lot done with talk lists and our wiki, two comm-techs which are open and "free" (in both senses).  Others find these to be insufficient and like or even prefer the interactivity that Slack provides.
> 
> Zeke is correct in his exasperation (that we share) of "OSM Reddit, Discord, Telegram, forum and probably other places as well" being so scattered:  it seems everybody wants "in on" the (transparent) method of "capturing" (and OWNING) communication via a proprietary platform.  Yes, this is a longer term issue for OSM to "solve," but I continue to believe that there is an open source / open data method for these kinds of communications that OSM might "standardize" upon.  For example, Zoom, while proprietary, has an open source complement in Jitsi (fully web-based, meaning it doesn't suffer from "Windows but not Mac, Android but not iOS..." sorts of issues), with perhaps 80% to 85% of feature set overlap (not bad).  I have not examined the universe of potential open source candidates that might realistically similarly complement Slack, but I'm certain that (over the longer term) OSM can move towards such a platform.  I have used (sometimes open, but alas, obsolete by now, usually closed, while employed by companies that use them) such collaboration software for decades:  no matter how "seemingly crude" the technology (and we are not "crude" today, except perhaps by future standards), there is ALWAYS a method to do this.  It usually takes some dedicated software development and ongoing maintenance, but the open source / open data community often, maybe even usually, is able to fill these niches where they appear (like here).
> 
> Much as there is a US Trails Working group, (this is crossposted to talk; its origin is talk-us), there might be a "Real-time collaboration open software" group.  Well, I can hope, anyway.  Is anybody up for spearheading this clearly longer-term endeavor for our project?  I seriously dislike the continuing trend I see in OSM of us handing over our rights and data (via Slack's onerous licensing agreement, for example) to private companies rather than keeping them open, like they deserve to be.
> 
> SteveA
> OSM Contributor (since 2009)
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