Moderator Edit: This post was written by a deleted user.
Voting has started for the proposal “Move mailing list from “required” to “recommended” for new proposals”
Please vote in SUPPORT of this proposal on its wiki page.
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Please vote in SUPPORT of this proposal on its wiki page.
As reminder, you are also allowed and encouraged to vote to oppose the proposal if you are opposed. I would advise to keep vote announcement more neutral.
I am confused about “To be clear, this proposal is not to eliminate the mailing list(s), simply removing the requirement to announce on them.” response to “I remain unconvinced that we should discard a long-standing requirement with minimal overhead.” vote.
It is clear that person voted against removing this requirement, and have not misinterpreted it as attempt to directly shut down tagging mailing list.
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we have emotions, which includes pride in work and excitement in proposing something new. I think asking people to support what I have worked on (while still showing all options in the voting page) is just an enthusiastic contributor excited to see their work put to a vote.
in this case, the “work” is nothing “new”, it’s only an administrative vote about getting rid of one implementation detail ( where to publish new ideas for discussion and voting).
Someone had to write the proposal, announce it in various places, respond to comments, be prepared to change the affected wiki pages and so on. That still takes time and effort. Administrative work is work, too.
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AFAIK it was new and proposal itself at Proposal:Move mailing list from "required" to "recommended" for new proposals - OpenStreetMap Wiki with listed changes was well prepared
if it was not new, can you link me to a proposal that was duplicated by it?
It’s really nice that you feel this way! I don’t want to take away from that.
The issue I see is where this enthuasiasm clouds the judgement for correct procedure.
In any other case, I wouldn’t point it out, because I like to see when people are happy! This situation, however, is different, because it goes to the heart of how we come to a consensus - even if we disagree with the results, we have to trust that the process is fair.
One issue I saw is that the link posted to the mailing list doesn’t work. It just so happens that people on the mailing list would probably vote against your proposal - an unfortunate situation that maybe could have been avoided.
To some extent, your behaviour triggers a sense in me that you are more interested in getting this proposal passed than to ensure that it deserves to pass. And that doesn’t ensure confidence that the area of the proposal whose content directly touches on that very issue has been well understood.
You set an example. You can have fun, but it must not come at the expense of correctness.
You should be happy then that I have abstained from voting.
I think that voting should be done by considering the proposal and its consequences. Not enough people do that in my opinion, but that’s besides the point. The important part is to reach a result that accurately reflects the current state and consensus of the community.
You won’t be able to force me to vote in favour. And that is coming from someone who won’t write a proposal for as long as this requirement (posting on mailing list) exists (Btw, thanks for making the proposal).
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Absolutely, but the argument was about “emotions which includes pride”, and “excitement in proposing something new”.
I agree that you have done a lot to make it visible, although I would argue there isn’t a “procedure” to change the requirements for the proposal process. The proposal process is about tagging questions.
From its wiki page:
This page describes the proposal process, which is one of multiple ways to introduce and discuss new tags for features and properties. The other ways are often undocumented. The proposal process was designed as a mechanism to document that a rough consensus exists within the community on how to model and tag a feature that previously had no established tagging. The open voting process acts as supporting evidence that the proposal author has adequately reflected feedback from interested parties and meaningfully addressed objections posed.
So while changing procedures is probably out of scope, this process is the best that we have, and it can show what the people contributing to the wiki think about the idea.
It was used previously for that and noone complained, so I would say that it is by tradition, in UK-style 
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Maybe because mailing-lists used to be a regular thing back when OSM started, but nowadays no, which makes sorta “old-school” like the IRC. They may still be used by some people, especially those interested in development and proposals, but now the majority of people interested in those things prefer other channels of communication, and usually aren’t eager to join more channels for the sake of the “procedures that exist for years now”. Which is why there have been attempts to slowly phase out the active usage of mailing-lists.
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yes, I meant using proposal process for changing how proposal process works (and at least once was used to settle design dispute at OSM Wiki, maybe there were other nontag cases)
Just one bit of anecdata - when I joined OSM in 2008** I was a bit surprised that the main communication channels then were still mailing lists rather than something else. If you had tried to wager that we’d be having this conversation in 2025 I would have given you good odds.
Somewhat ironically, I mostly read this forum as emails (because it supports that) 
** think George W Bush and the financial crisis (or perhaps ask your parents!)
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I may be younger than you (I assume, based on various stuff of yours I’ve read), but I sure have felt the global impact of the 2008 depression, and I’ve been using Internet since 2006.
As I said, mailing-lists feel like IRC, meaning it’s an old-school types of communication over the Internet which for sure will never fully-die (and sometimes may be savors), but the actual usability in ecosystems like OSM may not be sufficient enough per group in order to keep them as active.
Yes, I know this reply is mainly for the topic of retiring inactive mailing-lists, while the current one is just about changing the clarification in wiki about pretty much how important it actually is to post proposals/votings in the mailing-lists additionally to the other communication channels. And it also depends to how many of the people who care about proposals/votings, use the mailing-lists as a sole or main communication channel.
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Hi @SimonPoole thank you for your vote. Your opposition vote seems to be missing a timestamp and reason. Can you please update that so we have it for historical reference? Thanks in advance!
People very frequently forget to sign their comments on talk pages and votes. It happens to the best of us. Whenever you spot this, look through the page’s revision history to find the edit that introduced the comment, then edit the page’s current version to append {{unsigned|Their user name|01:02 03 April 2025 (UTC)}} to the comment. This adds a different kind of signature that explains your helpful edit. MediaWiki shows you each revision’s timestamp in your time zone, so you may need to do a little math to put it in UTC.
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