Hello everyone,
During last Friday’s meeting the @forums-governance team met to talk about some open discussions and next steps for these forums.
Attendees: @amapanda_ᚐᚋᚐᚅᚇᚐ @cquest @woodpeck @Nop @Firefishy @nukeador @Tordanik
Topics discussed
- Soft-launch reactions
- New categories process and initial categories
- Language and location based content
- Migration from the old forums
- Etiquette Guidelines questions
Not discussed (due lack of time)
- Help OSM transition plan
- Governance and accountability model
Decisions
Migration from the old forums
It was decided that migration of old content from the forums will be tried, @Firefishy and @cquest will work together testing and see if it works as expected with no major issues. Progress about this will be communicated.
Why? It was understood that it’s technically possible and there are people to support it, there were no major technical concerns. This is an option that solves the problems and needs expressed by existing forums users and communities.
Language and location based content
Since old forum spaces will be moved over here, country-based categories will exist. The Discourse Translation Plugin will be tested. Communities will be able to request language-based categories afterwards if that’s something people want.
Why? It was clear that people need to feel at home when coming from old platforms and country-based organization is what’s currently being used. It’s also important to provide room for communities to organize by language if that’s their desire and test new way for multi-language participation using machine translation technologies.
New categories process and initial categories
Communities and people will be able to request categories following the current proposal but it will be evaluated if the requirement of 3 mods per category is too much for small communities.
Why? Having an organic growth based on what the community needs seems reasonable, learnings and improvements to the process will come as a result of its use.
Etiquette Guidelines
For the categories resulting from the old forums migration, they will maintain the old forums guidelines, communities will be able to change them or use the OSM Etiquette Guidelines as described in the current approved process.
Why? The migration to a new tool is a challenging process and it’s important that users coming from old tools feel at home, there is no intention to disrupt the existing guidelines but offer the choice to improve them afterwards or use the new OSM ones.
Minutes
Draft minutes of the meeting are available on the OSMF website, thanks to @Doro8ea for compiling them!