For example, there are now hundreds of communication channels in use now. There is no way this is effective. This community is amazing, and gets stuff done anyway, but I would be very surprised if there isn’t a data-backed way to simplify things. The world’s advertising and social media companies are extremely good at deploying digital media communications to meet their goals. The data for this exists. What if OSM used it to establish an updated community communications process and protocols.
OSM thrives through the diversity of its community.
To capture the value of that diversity - the knowledge of millions of people about their home towns and the places they visit - it needs to meet people where they are.
For the Philippines, for example, that might be Telegram. For the US, it might be Slack. For the older family demographic, it might be Facebook. For the gamer demographic, it might be Discord. For the hacker demographic, it might be IRC.
Mandating a one-size-fits-all approach to communication would steamroller that diversity in favour of a (probably Western, college-educated, middle class dominated) monoculture. If we decide “ok, we’re centralising on Discord or whatever from now on”, we inevitably lose the diverse knowledge of people from cultures and demographics for whom that’s not a natural fit.
OSM has always taken an approach of “let a thousand flowers bloom”. Sometimes flowers die - like, slowly and inexorably, many of the mailing lists are doing. Sometimes they flower briefly and colourfully and are then never seen again. That’s fine. It doesn’t stop us planting new seeds and it doesn’t mean we have to cut down the whole rich biodiversity to sow one single hardy perennial.