Forums governance team meeting - 2022-05-05

Tordanik · 2022-05-12T07:51:10.186Z

The third @forums-governance team meeting has taken place on 2022-05-04T22:00:00Z.

Attendees: @Firefishy @nukeador @Tordanik @pnorman (~30 minutes into the meeting)

Topics discussed

Administrative matters
- Regular meeting schedule
- Minuting and Dorothea’s involvement
Forum migration progress
Moderator selection/polls
Help and support transition status
Transitioning other platforms
Downvoting on posts

Decisions and Results

Regular meeting schedule

Going forward, meetings of the moderation team will happen on a regular schedule every second week. Current plan is Thursday at 15:00 UTC, but this needs to be confirmed with the rest of the regular attendees.

Minuting and Dorothea’s involvement

In the past, minutes were composed by @Doro8ea. Future minutes will be taken by meeting participants. We will only ask for support if we really need it.

Forum migration progress

@cquest is still testing, closing aligning the compatibility between versions. End of May is still our desired date, but will depend on how far the current testing has gone.

Help and support transition status

The question-answer-plugin will be installed as soon as possible.

For migration, @Firefishy will look into the two options:

Migrate content and redirect.
Create an archive.

Minutes

Full collaborative minutes

Administrative matters

We should pick a fixed time for next meetings. Earlier might be better for Ruben and Tobias, Grant is OK, we should check with the rest of the regular attendees. We’ll try 2 hours earlier on Thursdays (every second week).

We should gather minutes ourselves, and ask for support only if we really need it.

Forum migration progress

Christian is still testing, closing aligning the compatibility between versions. Grant will ask for an update.
End of May is still our desired date, but will depend on how far the current testing has gone.
Grant now has the time to perform the migration when needed.

Moderator selection

We need to agree on how to select moderators for the forums.

Tobias is suggesting to figure out a self-governance process in the medium term (communties using polls to accept or reject applications for moderator status)
Ruben has some concerns about the process dynamics if we just rely on a poll.
Grant thinks we maybe don’t need to solve for the long term need, but rather have something that works now, and evaluate after a 3 month period. This might require taking some decisions from this group initially (choosing people).
Nop has been creating a list of things that are currently moderated at the German forums, also Ruben and Nop are working on guidelines for moderators, base on the official discourse ones.
Paul shared that we have a need for having at least a couple active moderators per category to make sure someone can be contacted.
Ruben: We might want to write down a description on what a moderator should have and use that to select the initial moderators.
Ruben and Tobias to come back with a proposal on the moderator selection process for this group review. If the governance team can agree on a proposal, it will be shared with the LCCWG moderation subcommittee for feedback and alignment.

Long-term perspective to replace governance team

Not discussed.

Help and support transition status

The plugin will be installed as soon as possible.

Question Answer Plugin - plugin - Discourse Meta

Grant will look into the two options:

Migrate content and redirect.
Create an archive.

Transitioning other platforms

At some point we should think how to support people and communities who want to transition to the forums (maybe communities currently on a mailing list).

It seems archiving is more likely the easier path for other platforms, specially because identities are not linked to OSM login, but still will require a transition plan when the old platform is closed and people redirected to the new one.

Downvoting on posts

We discussed about the request coming from some people on the need to downvote posts.

There are some assumptions on how having or not having this ability will impact the discussion dynamics:

Allowing people to downvote with no context might discourage participation.
By downvoting, reducing the number of disagreement replies to a message, reducing noise and negative dynamics.

We talked about a potential test where we enable this feature for period of time and then come back with data on how this has been impacting the discussion dynamics.

Removing abusive users

We need to document how and when we delete users as per their request. To be discussed in our next call.

Emilius123 · 2022-05-25T22:55:53.913Z

Has another meeting taken place by now? Are there minutes available?

nukeador · 2022-05-26T10:03:50.665Z

No, we haven’t been able to meet again due time constrains. We might try next week.