It is perfectly OK we use many channels to communicate, as they each have their specific uses. And our new forum [1] is becoming a vital resource of a community project like OSM. Emphasis on community.
One person's opinion: in less than a year, our new forum has grown to a place of light-to-moderate (and growing) activity, showing great potential for not only community-building (and actually doing so, but a bit at a time — "Rome wasn't built in a day") but for flexibility as well: it continues to become better "tuned" to resonate with its users. Especially because it has dedicated people who both listen to ongoing concerns, as well as implementing good solutions to them (and august members as moderators, and vibrant community participation...), I have high hopes that over the course of years, our new forum will be a quite-central hub of OSM communication, proving its usefulness as not only "one more, today" channel, but eventually it will become for many (most?) of us, a "first among many" channel. There really isn't any way to enforce that people use a particular channel for day-to-day communication, especially with the wide choices out there: often "the latest gadget" attracts some and may or may not have staying power. Slack is popular today (will it be in the future?), but isn't universally subscribed to, and in an Open project, this is understandable. However, with proposal announcements, we really do want to be as broad as possible, so they reach affected users. It's difficult or impossible to reach everyone successfully 100% of the time, the best we can do is strive to reach the most. We do OK here, though we can do better. We can vote to approve this proposal, and establish that proposals are at least in one agreeable-to-all (or most) location. In that way, even "news-like" communication channels (like WeeklyOSM [2]) can broadly "announce" new proposals, reaching an even broader audience. Of course, it is wise of WeeklyOSM to monitor as many channels as it makes sense to "listen to," this is what they do. They'll keep their finger on the pulse of this, and consciously or not, the rest of us will (do) notice these distinctions as well. Over time, things do shift, any longer-term Contributor can confirm that. Importantly, things tend to go from somewhat-blurry to rather sharply-focused, though again, this does take time. While it is important to understand a distinction between "also move to our new forum" and "must move to our new forum," if this proposal passes, this can be characterized as "yes to both." This distinction becomes less important as time goes on. Let's underscore here and now that this ongoing-right-now process is somewhat slow (years) in unfolding into our future, stretching far ahead. We don't know now, but we will know better ahead when it makes sense to emphasize the forum, or de-emphasize mail-lists, or describe wiki as more documentation-like with a certain amount of growth and change, "alive" with their Talk pages — or whatever methodologies might still yet emerge. I doubt we will decide to de-emphasize to the extent we "pull the plug" on any specific channel (soon), but I observe that with our discussions, we know when it is time to do that, and we will. (Similar to how, as of now, our old forum [3] is being largely deprecated by our new one). Please take part in guiding this, as doing so is another vital part of the feedback loop that continues to improve OSM. This proposal has a unique ability to spark a flame of vitality into what is already an important channel. It seems to be about injecting relevance into our new forum. Making deliberate choices, both as individuals and as members of this community, we steer how we both talk among ourselves as well as make important community-wide decisions (like about tagging). But as this vitality and relevance are seen as successful with tagging proposals (should this be Approved), watch how we'll see momentum gather for similar desired shifts. Thanks for reading. [1] https://community.osm.org [2] https://weeklyosm.eu [3] https://forum.osm.org > On Nov 19, 2022, at 7:03 AM, Davidoskky via Tagging > <tagging@openstreetmap.org> wrote: > >> If it is indeed better (which I personally am not convinced), then why not >> change the proposal to ask that, in addition to the tagging mailing list, >> proposal might (or should?) be announced at *as many contact channels as >> possible* of those listed >> athttps://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Contact_channels >> (and the proponents should monitor all of them where they posted, and >> incorporete >> ideas from then on wiki proposal page). _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
