Moving to the new forum for proposals and voting

you don’t have to engage in mailing list discussions if you only want to announce an RFC or proposal voting.

It is not complicated at all, these are free form, all you have to do is send an email to tagging.

If you can’t edit the wiki you won’t be able to set up a proposal anyway, or is the suggestion to propose tags here and hope that someone will copy it over once it’s approved?

it is also not clear what you should do if you contribute to several places, should you copy everything to all of them?

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My recommendation would be to gather feedback for a fixed amount of time (set a deadline) and then come with a proposal based on the general consensus.

It might be worth to test if the forums fit people’s expectations by agreeing with the tagging mailing list to do a pilot with just one upcoming discussion/voting, that will take place here instead.

Based on this pilot, the proposal can be improved.

Cheers.

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Voting results and comments from the forum can be transferred afterwards to the proposal wiki, to consolidate the results, I assume?Assuming that the proposal itself remains a wiki page.

I’m not sure if this has been looked into, but in another group I am a part of, we were transitioning away from a Google Group to Discourse and we had it setup so incoming messages posted to the Google Group were visible in Discourse, but set as read only. Gradually most people have transitioned away from Google Group.

I know this is not the first time it has been suggested and it should go through a proposal process, but ultimately I support voting for proposals on Discourse.

I don’t think that voting should be moved from the Wiki because voting should be close to the proposal. (But I understand that currently voting on the Wiki is a little cumbersome. Maybe there is something like User:Jack who built the house/Convenient Discussions - Wikimedia Commons for voting?)
Also having discussions close the proposal is beneficial.

Moving the required announcements to discourse is a good idea once using discourse like a mailing list works completely. Having a special category for the announcements here is certainly good.

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I remeber someone commented in the past to see if we can plug discourse topics/messags in mediawiki

I’d be willing to volunteer: As of now, to gather valuable input requires following a multitude of isolated communication channels. Still though, for the actual voting, as much as I hate the arcane editing there, I consider the Wiki the most reliable channel, as this it the only one, that has a proven audit trail.

Discourse not? Every change to a contribution is documented here. Through the functionalities of Discourse, we even have the possibility here to really ensure that it is counted correctly and that each user only votes once. Multiple accounts are a problem for both Discourse and the Wiki…

Yes, I support putting forward a proposal to the community to move discussion (of all types) onto this community server. I will discuss the merits of the proposal once the proposed proposal is properly prepared and proposed.

RFC open for:

Made two proposals of it to make sure the voting of both features are separate
(also announced on the mailing list)

I responded to the two proposals on their talk pages.

I agree that the user experience of the proposal process leaves much to be desired. However I don’t think that migrating the proposal process to Discourse is a good idea. Discussions here cannot be structured as well as discussions on wiki talk pages can be. Discourse’s voting system doesn’t allow you to add a comment to your vote, which is very much essential to the proposal process and as @Mateusz_Konieczny has said on the respective mailing list thread: having the voting on a different page than the proposal is certainly not a good idea.

I still think that it’s very good that you’re pushing for better UX and less barriers. I think we can all agree on both being very much important … so we should certainly work on improving the UX and removing such barriers. I just don’t think that simply migrating the process to Discourse would yield any net benefit.

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I am new in the tagging mailing list and only took part to one voting until now, so I will not express myself on proposals and voting.
Regarding discussion, however, I am in favor of moving it to the forums.
I’ll list a couple reasons:

  1. As pointed out, subscribing to the mailing list is a barrier to enter. It is not a large barrier, but still requires that you understand there’s a mailing list and that you have to subscribe to it in order to know what is going on. With the forum you can simply browse the forum or find a link to a particular discussion and easily read everything that is going on.
  2. It’s not easy to follow a long discussion in the mailing list. You may lose some emails or forget something that was said a few days before and definitely it’s not easy to reference something that has been said a lot of time ago.
  3. Emails are a mess: if you decide to receive all the emails you will have your inbox daily filled with a lot of messages; many of which you may not care about. If you use the daily/weekly digest you get one single email which is poorly formatted and in which is difficult to understand where a message starts and ends, who wrote it and who he’s replying to.

Because of these reasons I would consider the forum a superior place where to conduct all discussion, provided that:

  1. It is possible to subscribe by email/rss feed to the new threads opened under one tag (e.g. every time someone opens a new discussion tagged tagging I will receive one email or one digest with all the ones opened in one day)
  2. It is possible to subscribe to a single thread, thus every time someone replies to a discussion I’m interested in I receive an email or a daily digest that tells me in which threads there are new messages.
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It is possible to follow tags. Click a tag and you get on a page like this. On the right you can click the bell icon to subscribe to this tags. SO if all RFC and vote topics get this tag, you will be notified.

For a rss feed, click a tag again and add .rss like https://community.openstreetmap.org/tag/proposal.rss

| davidoskky
September 24 |

  • | - |

I am new in the tagging mailing list and only took part to one voting until now, so I will not express myself on proposals and voting.
Regarding discussion, however, I am in favor of moving it to the forums.
I’ll list a couple reasons:

  1. As pointed out, subscribing to the mailing list is a barrier to enter. It is not a large barrier, but still requires that you understand there’s a mailing list and that you have to subscribe to it in order to know what is going on. With the forum you can simply browse the forum or find a link to a particular discussion and easily read everything that is going on.

you can read the mailing lists also as a visitor
Here are all the lists: https://lists.openstreetmap.org
this is the overview for the tagging ml archives:
The Tagging Archives
this is a thread:
[Tagging] Feature Proposal - RFC - Move proposal voting from wiki to the new forum
you can go to the next message with the link at the bottom Next message (by thread)

  1. It’s not easy to follow a long discussion in the mailing list. You may lose some emails or forget something that was said a few days before and definitely it’s not easy to reference something that has been said a lot of time ago.

you can have the archive grouped by thread, so you will not miss any mail that was sent, in chronological order.

  1. Emails are a mess: if you decide to receive all the emails you will have your inbox daily filled with a lot of messages; many of which you may not care about. If you use the daily/weekly digest you get one single email which is poorly formatted and in which is difficult to understand where a message starts and ends, who wrote it and who he’s replying to.

one of the solutions to this topic is filtering. You may for example skip the inbox for some kind of messages, or use a dedicated email account for the osm mailing list. The digest is not recommendable, unless you know how to extract the messages (they are multipart messages that can be split into the individual messages, you need an email client who offers this feature), but still most people prefer to not have the delay.

(btw., these points above should be 1, 2, 3)

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Yes you can, but for me the mailing list archive is a cumbersome interface to navigate. I know many others will feel the same way. Discourse has it’s problems as well, but it is overall much more welcoming, efficient, and easier to use than the mailing list archive.

This is only true for messages sent after you subscribe to the list. If you’ve just joined and are trying to reference messages from two days ago you are out of luck.

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I was refering to the public archives. Locally you can do any search and ordering you like, but only of those messages that are available. with services like gmane you can access via NNTP

http://news.gmane.io/ and probably also download everything back to 2009 (tagging), 2005 (dev) or 2004 (talk). Somehow, talk has become low traffic since tagging was introduced, before Oct 2009 the tagging discussions are in talk :wink:

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You are right.
As @ezekielf said however, the interface to navigate through messages is rather clunky and requires several clicks to read through a conversation.
I feel that scrolling through the forum webpage is a much easier way to read the full thread and to go back to a particular message that interested you.

This introduces the necessity of external tools to correctly navigate the discussions, which isn’t ideal.
As far as I can see, the forum looks a nice resource for talking and discussing ideas and it should not require any external tool or technical expertise to navigate.
I do most of my work on Linux and most of it is comprised of developing software, thus understanding NNTP and how to use it to retrieve messages could be feasible for me, but it probably isn’t for a lot of other people who know nothing about these things.

The only problem I see with the forum itself is that, as far as I understand, you cannot reply with an email.
If that could be possible, there would substantially be no difference between using the forum and the mailing list, except that the forum has an easier to use interface.

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Aah, my mistake. Yes the public archives can be grouped by thread.

I’ve never heard of this service before. Probably because it’s not recommended or linked to on the mailing list info page. It says:

To see the collection of prior postings to the list, visit the Tagging Archives.

So that’s what most people are going to do.

Just running a proposal, I learned:

The community discussion of great help in coming up with a first rough line of what should be the core of the proposal.

All of the mailing list, the community discourse and the wiki talk page great sources of guidance in refining and even changing aspects of the proposal.

Yet, I do not see any other reason to unite discussion under one single medium, except for my convenience as proponent, to have everything in one place.

I rather not have the discourse forum this one-stop-shop. The lack of threading makes this very cumbersome to follow in an organised manner. I expect this interjection of mine to soon get drowned in a flood of other ideas.

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