Forums governance team meeting - 2022-06-16

Another @forums-governance team meeting took place on 2022-06-15T22:00:00Z.

Attendees: @Firefishy @nukeador @Tordanik

Topics discussed

  • Unblocking migration of forum.osm.org
  • Plans on help.osm.org transition
    • Content migration or archive
    • Acknowledgement for users’ reputation
    • Tags
    • Plugin installation
  • Public communication and forum visibility
  • Quick status checks on open requests in the site-feedback category

Decisions and results

Unblocking migration of forum.osm.org

  • @Firefishy to talk to @cquest and evaluate the best way of supporting the work as well as the complexity of the work to be done
  • Next week we’ll publish the status and an updated plan.
  • @Firefishy discovered that some themes on the old forum did not show the banner.

Plans on help.osm.org transition

  • Questions-answers plugin was deprecated in favour of a new official one (Discourse Question Answer - plugin - Discourse Meta). We’ll wait until this new one is ready for deployment.
  • By 2022-07-14T00:00:00Z we’ll take an informed decision on migration option based on research from @Firefishy
  • This will not be the focus until migration of forum.osm.org is complete.

Public communication plans

  • Keep encouraging new community categories to update their community index info with the new forum. Should preferably be ranked above comparable platforms.
  • The forums should be linked directly from the openstreetmap.org website at some point, but we need to figure out the specifics. (Where to position links? Do we need to open a discussion about how the /help /about pages are going to be updated? Who should handle this?)

Quick status checks on smaller open requests

Keep encouraging new community categories to update their community index info with the new forum. Should preferably be ranked above comparable platforms.

see

The question of timing is a good one. With the migration delayed, we need to figure out whether there is any moment we want to treat as a “launch”.

in that thread. Should this forums be considered as launched or as being in testing phase?

I just found

so seems to be fully launched I guess?

The platform is stable and has the necessary features to replace forum.osm.org. It can be used for everyday discussion of OSM topics and you’re welcome to do so. So yes, it is launched. We’re still working on improving it further, but that shouldn’t stop anyone from using it.

I realize that it’s in a bit of an awkward state because the migration effort is taking longer than intended. Expect us to do another larger round of promotion of the new platform as a whole after that effort is complete.

Individual communities are welcome to request the categories they need, start promoting the new space, and encouraging their members to move over here. (But if some communities wish to wait for the migration, that’s ok, too.)

1 Like