In the last months, a dozen Discourse topics have been created about how to tag outdoors ways and routes, and they have attracted comments from the same crowd. There have been genuine, and relatively successful given the difficulty of the task, attempts at structuring the debates. Still, reading the threads is very difficult because they tend to ramble from one topic to another.
This morning I was burning to ask a couple of questions (where did I see these short texts that I liked about sac_scale and that mentioned ankle, knee and hip? how would you map this place where the path totally disappears for twenty meters?) but did not feel like adding to the disorder of any of the ongoing threads. Then I wondered, not for the first time, “would it help to have a Telegram or Signal or Matrix channel to relieve Discourse from unstructured exchanges of ideas?”
In all honesty, we have one in France (OSM Plein Air) that is so effective at this that we rarely create Discourse topics. But I believe that circumstances are different, because national groups are not where we define tags.
Then I wondered, not for the first time, “would it help to have a Telegram or Signal or Matrix channel to relieve Discourse from unstructured exchanges of ideas?”
In all honesty, we have one in France that is so effective at this that we rarely create Discourse topics
it may be great to achieve consensus but it likely isn’t for documenting the process
Yes, it’s what we observed in France: consensus comes fairly easily but we don’t document it much.
But my hope is that our drive would be slightly different. In France, we don’t really have the power to change tags. Here, it’s a bit different. Hopefully it makes a difference.
Because that would contribute further to making Discourse useless for reaching consensus, because its contents is too rich and complex to exploit for a human brain.
There will always be a hierarchy of chat, questions, discussions, polls, summaries, consensus, RFCs, documentation, and then doubting the consensus again.
I think it’s still better to have all the questions and discussions in one place. Here you can search for them, link them, and so on.
Fragmentation makes it just harder to see who has discussed what already. The complexity doesn’t go away. How could we ever reach consensus in a global project, if discussions are split between let’s say a German outdoor group on Matrix, a Polish outdoor group on Telegram and a US group on Slack?
