Is it possible to split the various Communities down further into sub-Communities?
e.g. for the Oceania community, could we then split it further by having Oceania-Australia; Oceania-New Zealand etc?
The way this site is currently configured, that’s not possible. There is a max_category_nesting setting available which could be set by people with server access and which would allow this, but under the default configuration, one level of nesting is the maximum.
The reason why Discourse works this way by default is that the Discourse developers want to encourage people to use tags instead of categories for this. Not sure if this fits your use case. I am aware that discoverability is a major downside of tags.
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If you want to encourage the use of tags it would help if more users would be able to add or modify them.
Right now, you need to be on level 3 which I suspect to be a small group (sorry, have no numbers) and which is even downgraded to level 2 once you are inactive for a few weeks.
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You can create “virtual categories” by combining categories and tags like https://community.openstreetmap.org/search?q=%23communities%3Aoceania%20tags%3Aaustralia%20order%3Alatest.
“australia” and “new zealand” exist as tags, for the other countries I suspect that the local moderators and level 3 users could just keep an eye on new topics and create geographical tags as needed. That’s broadly what I’ve been doing for new topics in Help and Support - if it really applies to e.g. Wales, add that as a tag.
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In my estimation, one of the factors hampering the U.S. community’s adoption of United States is the coarseness of nationwide subcategories. There are some things we like to discuss as a national community, but there are also other things that need a more intimate local community to feel like we can first achieve a local consensus on something. This subcategory technically hasn’t yet reached Dunbar’s number in terms of who participates, but it certainly does in terms of the addressable audience. People really hesitate to post to a national audience.
Back when the U.S. mappers primarily communicated on the talk-us mailing list, discussions about how to format highway refs or classify places often happened in private messages or e-mail exchanges among cliques of mappers. These discussions became much more productive and manageable once the community adopted Slack, where users can create new channels with abandon. Some #local- channels are quite popular (while others are veritable ghost towns).
Tags are helpful, but they feel like more of a way to manage information overload than to foster a sense of community. As far as I know, the only other Discourse feature that seems to speak to this need would be Discourse Chat. An arbitrary number of chat channels can be tied to a single forum subcategory, so in principle we could create a chat channel for each of the states, maybe some of the big cities too. I think this would help a bit, since local conversations tend to be more casual than national ones.
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Thanks for that, as the US Slack threads were exactly the example I was thinking of.
As mentioned previously, we’re trying to get OSM Oceania up & running, so having a way that people in Fiji, Micronesia, Tuvalu etc can talk to each other about their issues, rather than being drowned out by Australian discussions, would be great!
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