Hello! I’ve used OSM off and on for years now, but I’ve been taking more of an interest in it lately. I was looking to see if there are any community channels for OSM US, but it looks like it’s mostly centralized on platforms like slack, discord, and facebook. Are there any active open-source ones? I saw there are matrix and IRC channels, but they seem to be barely used. Are there any others? Preferably on IRC or jabber? I’d even be fine with signal or matrix
I also saw the calendar but it looks like everything is over Zoom. Are there any equivilents over alternatives like Jitsi Meet? Is there a webcal/ics link for the calendar?
The short answer is no. There are global IRC and Jabber rooms, but you’re less likely to encounter Americans there. For the U.S. community, nothing has nearly the critical mass that the OSMUS Slack workspace has. That said, nothing is preventing individuals like you from starting an alternative on another platform. It would be a useful hedge against any adverse change to Slack in the future. Realistically, it would probably take such a change to dislodge Slack at this point.
A couple years ago, we had a scare about losing access to the many years of chat history. (Some were actually in favor of that, but it turned out to be a false alarm.) Naturally, any thread here on the forum will be a little biased in favor of the forum against anything else, but you can see some of the considerations that the community there cares about:
Every now and then, someone asks in Slack about migrating to an alternative, then the usual bikeshedding about the best alternative platform, then nothing happens. I assume the same happens on OSM World Discord on occasion. On the bright side, one of the OSMUS charter projects, OpenHistoricalMap, has mostly weaned itself off Slack in favor of the OHM Forum, which has enabled the Discourse Chat feature. This forum is running the same open source software, so in principle, Discourse Chat could be enabled here too, but it won’t happen without (at least) enough demand among OSM community members.
Yes, the OSMF has arranged for an open source BigBlueButton instance that you can use for community meetings. Some local groups in the U.S. use this instance, including the Bay Area and Midwest meetups. However, official OSMUS events such as Mappy Hours tend to take place over Zoom. If you prefer not to use the Zoom client, there’s always a phone number that you can call to join the meeting the good old-fashioned way.
Yes, OSMCal publishes an iCalendar and RSS feed for each region.
That decision was based on the specific proposal in the thread, which aimed to consolidate various platforms’ discussions in one place. On the contrary, I think Discourse Chat would be valuable to the U.S. community even if it doesn’t directly affect other chat platforms. After all, OSMUS Slack didn’t replace the talk-us mailing list; it was an alternative that grew on its own while the mailing list ran its course.
Discourse Chat could be just another option, the one tied to an OSM account. If it ends up as much of a ghost town as the U.S. Discord server was (last I heard), then it doesn’t really hurt OSM’s reputation, since the rest of the forum will be quite lively. The forum governance team called for a global strategy, but I wonder if that’s really necessary. How about we enable one or more chat channels for just Communities > United States, provided that this category’s moderators are comfortable moderating the chat channels too? And if folks from other regional communities pile into the chat channels because they lack their own, then that would demonstrate demand for additional channels tied to other categories.
(Yes, I realize I’m probably volunteering myself for moderation duties. )
Oh wow, thank you for all the information and links! I am working on getting a local maker group going, maybe I can drum up interest for a local OSM channel there. We’ll see
How about in the world jabber channels? If I’m going to be in a world channel, might as well be something I don’t have to use slidge or bifrost for and isn’t bridged to discord
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