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