The biggest issue is that this is only in English, and in its current state, it does not allow for translations, which, in some way, blocks the diversity of OSM.
The issue was raised in 2018, but no one has expressed interest in taking action, especially someone from the OSM foundation, as this repository is from that (GitHub) organization.
I think the OSM foundation should not own this repository; it should be transferred to the more active community (OpenStreetMap on GitHub · GitHub), which could attract more users to translate and improve these guidelines. The OSM Welcome mat is key for newcomers to understand the project and then use, participate, and contribute.
How, technically, would that work? I’ve not contributed to the Welcome Mat, but it seems to be a Jekyll site and translations are mentioned in the contributing page.
Are you proposing that it would stay the same separate Jekyll site, and translations would somehow magically become available via https://translatewiki.net/wiki/Translating:OpenStreetMap, or that the welcome mat pages become pages within the regular OSM site and need to be further maintained there (with translations supported as per the other OSM site pages)?
As an aside - you might be interested in reading this PR for the switch2osm website (another OSM-focused Jekyll site). That proposes to add translation support to that site by moving to mkdocs and using Transifex (unfortunately among other things, and alas that caused the PR to stall).
I don’t know how it should work, I am not proposing something specific. Integrating into transalatewiki will be the most appropriate thing, as the rest of the OSM website is there (Btw, I have been very involved in this platform recently, to have a good Spanish translation), and that’s where my doubt arose; many strings from the OSM website refer to the Mat, but the Mat content was not there.
Having this repository into the OSMF organization is not the best thing; few people identify or participate in these repositories compared to the OSM (Github) organization.
Changing this to transifex is another good option too (thanks to the link I discovered other projects I can contribute to), but the original purpose of this thread is to see what the community thinks, which options do we have, and then take a decision.
Before we can talk about choosing a translation management system for the Welcome Mat microsite, someone needs to make it localizable. Otherwise, the translation effort would go to waste. In fact, many small, stable projects simply maintain translations in a JSON or JavaScript file somewhere in the repository for simplicity – not ideal, but even these sites still need some mechanism for switching languages on the fly.
The linked issue reveals some apparent differences of opinion about the Welcome Mat’s purpose and target audience. I’ve flagged it to the CWG in case they see any unmet strategic needs around this microsite these days.
Also, this migration can use the best practices from my other rework (Switch2OSM) to connect Transifex, CrowdIn, … (you name it) to engage the community to work on translations. Switch to OpenStreetMap - Switch2OSM
The linked issue reveals some apparent differences of opinion about the Welcome Mat’s purpose and target audience. I’ve flagged it to the CWG in case they see any unmet strategic needs around this microsite these days.
This is the key issue to think about. The Welcome Mat was an initiative of the OSMF Board, in response to consistent direct queries from organizations about how to get involved in OSM. More details here.
I don’t know how often it’s used like that these days. I don’t think we have tracking on it? The most prominent link is from OpenStreetMap. Certainly a lot of the content is relevant for anyone who wants to learn more about OpenStreetMap, and does so in a well organized way.
Taking a step back on the website, I think better organized and integrated onboarding material would be great. There’s an interesting discussion to be had about the content on osm.org, what’s needed, how we organize to evolve it to best serve new and existing mappers. I don’t think that has much to do with what GitHub organization owns this repository, but rather the expectations of how project is organized and decisions made.
As a communications project, I do think the OSMF Communications Working Group is still the best place to work this out. Would love for interested folks to raise their hand to get involved there.
All that said, we shouldn’t block good updates on messy questions like these. There’s a lot of improvements in @andygol version. I think we could work to address some of the rough edges in that, and consider moving code over to the repo that drives the Welcome Mat. That might also need some input from @Firefishy who set up deployment to welcome.openstreetmap.org
I am working on the translation, but it takes time. However, I want to put my efforts onto something that will be used, published.
Currently, in Andy’s repository there are already 2 translations to Polish and Ukrainian. So it has multiple language already. And soon, it will have Spanish as well.
We have to answer these questions, and the community should decide. As the Mat microsite is under the openstreetmap site, the osmf should follow its principle (“The OpenStreetMap Foundation is an international not-for-profit organization supporting, but not controlling, the OpenStreetMap Project”) and not decide on this (“The foundation is the custodian for the computer servers and services necessary to host the OpenStreetMap project”) issue, even if that repository was an OSMF initiative.
Thank you so much, @AngocA, for your help with the translation into Spanish – you’re a star! I’m very happy to tell those of you who speak Spanish that you’ll now be able to use the Spanish version of Welcome Mat without any difficulty.
Ideally, the website would be deployed from a repository within a GitHub organization instead of a personal account. If people are on board with it, we could tackle multiple things at the same time by moving Andygol/welcome-mat-osmf to openstreetmap/welcome-mat, deploying the site from there, and archiving osmfoundation/welcome-mat (without having to move it anywhere).
@mikelmaron any concerns with this approach from the CWG’s perspective, or any ideas about timing? @andygol would you be interested in handholding us during this process, assuming there aren’t any objections? I suspect it would be slightly more straightforward than what was proposed for the switch2osm site.
I’m very happy to tell those of you who speak Spanish that you’ll now be able to use the Spanish version of Welcome Mat without any difficulty.