Hi all. Having lots of discussion / communication channels for OpenStreetMap has it’s advantages but it also comes with disadvantages.
I have noticed that we have a lot of mailing lists included in the section above the archive list (ie. implying they are “active”) on the wiki here and even more on the listinfo page here.
Many have not seen a post by a real human in months, if not years. As a random example “party” has not had a post since March 2019.
My view is that having these still listed could be adding to the confusion on where best to post. It also looks bad to people new to OSM as it makes us look inactive.
I am therefore starting this discussion to get ideas as to what to do about it.
One option could be to create some rules under which an old ML could be archived. As an example a ML could be set to “archived” if:
There has been no post by a human in the last 4 months (this excludes the WeeklyOSM emails); or
The current moderators decide to retire and after an announcement and a 1 month period, nobody else steps in to be the new moderators for that list.
Archived MLs should be marked as such, e.g. this example: Legal-general Info Page . Archived MLs can be moved to the archive section on the wiki (which may need moving to a sub-page as it becomes long).
This ticket has also gathered a list of mailing lists that look like they should be retired:
One caveat is that archiving a regional mailing list should be an opportunity to establish a replacement here on the forum. Otherwise, the community may be naturally inclined to migrate exclusively to a closed platform like Facebook or Telegram instead, where the barriers to setting up or joining a channel are comparatively low.
Getting a forum subcategory started requires more critical mass and administrative steps than the mailing lists previously required. For this reason, so far, I’ve been unable to shut down the ghost town that is talk-vi. Everyone in the Vietnamese community either uses Facebook or refrains from communicating instead, making it difficult to discuss anything that needs community consensus. I could force the issue by retiring as the list administrator, but it won’t really change anything with respect to the Facebook group.
I don’t think we need to create a subcategory here before archiving a ML. That could just result in an unused channel here instead. What we should do however is generally remind communities that they can use this Community Forum and how they can request a subcategory on it.
I appreciate the work you are doing with the Vietnamese community to encourage them to use an open forum. Sorry to hear that you have struggled. Perhaps we need to introduce some stronger incentives to encourage use of open forums as opposed to closed ones. Example: strict rule that only imports/automated edits can proceed if discussed on an open forum.