👋 Welcome to the forum, get involved in the next steps here!

[Cartographer10]

Great development. This modernization was much needed. This would also result in a mobile friendly forum.

My biggest wish with this new forum is that the (tagging) voting can move from OSM wiki to this forum. If possible, voting and discussing here would make the process much more accessible to all OSM contributers. Writing the proposals can still be done on wiki but discussion and especially voting should move to here. This would need a proposal category on this forum where post can be made for RFC and voting.

[nukeador (Rubén Martín)]

@Cartographer10

This would need a proposal category on this forum where post can be made for RFC and voting.

That reminds me on how the Rust project handles conversations around their RFC, this talk might be relevant to inform OSM thinking.

[Tordanik (Tobias Knerr)]

@Cartographer10

My biggest wish with this new forum is that the (tagging) voting can move from OSM wiki to this forum. If possible, voting and discussing here would make the process much more accessible to all OSM contributers. Writing the proposals can still be done on wiki but discussion and especially voting should move to here.

I agree that this forum could potentially be a much more accessible platform for discussing and voting on proposals than wiki pages. There are a lot more contributors with an OSM account than an OSM wiki account and the usability of a poll tool easily beats that of manually adding templates and signatures to a list in wiki syntax.

[JeroenHoek]

@Tordanik

I agree that this forum could potentially be a much more accessible platform for discussing and voting on proposals than wiki pages. There are a lot more contributors with an OSM account than an OSM wiki account and the usability of a poll tool easily beats that of manually adding templates and signatures to a list in wiki syntax.

As long as there is a way to log the result of a vote on the wiki afterwards, this seems fine. I do like how the current voting process strongly emphasizes explaining why someone votes against a proposal. Would that be possible with Discourse?

[Map_HeRo (Mikke)]

One of the major problems for every worldwide community platform is the language barrier. Not everyone feels fit to debate complex matters in english and using a translations software to work your way through an extensive topic is a tiring thing, not to talk about the quality of the outcome which has significantly increased over the past years (at least for the most widespread languages) but still does not match what I would call close to perfect.

There are so many users in countries all over the world contributing to the database as well as to the national forums backing off from participation in these basical discussions because of this language barrier. I am sure many of them would be ready and able to deliver valuable input and it is a pity all this knowledge and expertise remains an unused treasure.

My vision of a such a community platform would be some kind of integrated translator showing the content of each and every post in the language any user has chosen as default so that everyone interested in participation could do so in the own language without any restriction. Yep, this is some kind of science fiction only - but this would finally be a real big step forward in multilingual communication.

Just a thought …

[karlos (Karl-Josef Adler)]

Well, great inspiration. The WeeklyOSM newsletter uses Google Translate. I am not happy with Google, but it’s useful for such situations.

So this forum should have:

• a setting for each user, what language(s) are acceptable
• the feature to decode the used language of a post
• a button at each post “translate to my language”

I doubt, Discourse will / could have all that.

[mDav]

@Map_HeRo @karlos There is an option of an integrated translation plugin, see the following topic

We Need The Discourse Translation Plugin

If this global multi-language community forum is to succeed and thrive together, we need a method to translate posts from its original language, into a users home language. There exists a plugin which allows for this functionality: Who thinks this will be a benefit to our community? Who doesn’t? And why? Are there any barriers to the implementation of a translation plugin? (@Site Admins) Any reason why we should not test such a plugin? If this succeeds and becomes a popular feature, enough t…

This plugin may not solve everything but it surely addresses quite a bit of the desires you each have. Check it out and if you believe this would be a worthy addition to our community forums here please reply or the post so it gets more attention.

Furthermore, translation with DeepL is possible with an existing fork of the translation plugin; DeepL is really fantastic for translation, my friend a professional translator uses it all the time. Maybe it’s not perfect but is objectively much better than all the others.

[Map_HeRo (Mikke)]

An integrated translation plugin would be a good step forward at least, so thanks for the hint and starting the topic!

And yes, DeepL is for sure one of the best translators but using it to manually translate one post of a topic after the other one is an awkward job … an integrated solution would do much better.

[nukeador (Rubén Martín)]

Yes, see the current proposal about languages and locations, which includes a point about enabling multilingual collaboration

Language and location based content and categories

Español

Esta propuesta es el resultado de consolidar <a href="https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/handling-categories-and-languages/269/">comentarios muy diversos</a> sobre idiomas, lugares y categorías. Por favor, queremos leer tu opinión en los comentarios de abajo. Reconocemos que OpenStreetMap es una comunidad muy diversa, multicultural y multilingüe, que no puede traducirse fácilmente en una simple categorización u organización del foro. Algunos de los retos que …

[SomeoneElse (Andy Townsend)]

@mDav

objectively much better than all the others.

My experenice with it depends very much on language. If you want to go from X to Y where X and Y aren’t common languages and aren’t German, you end up in some cases with something that sounds like its gone through German to get from X to Y. In my case one language was English and the other ones included Arabic, Persian and Chinese. It may well be excellent for other X and Y.

[dieterdreist]

it’s great for German

[mDav]

Yeah it’s not perfect. But is it good enough for folks to communicate between languages on this forum? We’ll only know if we try

[nukeador (Rubén Martín)]

In the current proposal, that something we want to try, but we want to avoid increasing the scope of work in this first phase because there are other major work involved in transitioning Help OSM and the old forums.

If we end up approving the proposal, we’ll also check with the Operation team in terms of resources and time to see when we can accommodate this testing.

[mDav]

From what I can tell from @TomH’s (OWG) messages in the other topic re: Translation Plugin:

We Need The Discourse Translation Plugin

This is the real question - from an operations point of view I am sure there are no objections to installing the plugin except that we somehow need to estimate what usage is likely to be so that we can work out the likely cost and seek a budget for it.

We Need The Discourse Translation Plugin

It’s not really up to me as I’m not the lead on this project. I was just commenting with my OWG hat on as to what we would be concerned about.

The admins approval is what’s holding back this proposal; to install a plugin on Discourse is trivial at best. @TomH’s concern about budgeting is valid but not necessary to solve at this stage as there are ways to try translation services for free to see if t works for our community.

I don’t advocate any major decisions on the future of this community platform to be made with haste, but in the case of the translation plugin I consider it a precursor for the community to be best informed what forum category structure we desire, which makes it a priority along with transitioning the old forums.

[Johnwhelan]

I see lots of gibberish “<!–” for example. I need to classify before I post? could someone please explain in simple terms how this place is supposed to work and not just “it’s new and exciting.”

Thanks John

[nukeador (Rubén Martín)]

Hi @Johnwhelan

There are currently no plans to replace mailing lists at this point, the current goals and scope are described on this introductory topic where I’ve just moved your message to.

Are there specific questions you have about this post?

[nukeador (Rubén Martín)]

Sharing with you all the summary of some conversations and decisions from last Friday’s meeting:

Forums governance team meeting - 2022-04-01

Hello everyone, During last Friday’s meeting the @forums-governance team met to talk about some open discussions and next steps for these forums. Attendees: @amapanda_ᚐᚋᚐᚅᚇᚐ @cquest @woodpeck @Nop @Firefishy @nukeador @Tordanik Topics discussed Soft-launch reactions New categories process and initial categories Language and location based content Migration from the old forums Etiquette Guidelines questions Not discussed (due lack of time) Help OSM transition plan Governance and accountab…

[julcnx]

5. Dedicated moderators per category and sub-category. Etiquette guidelines template should be provided, and content could be adapted by category moderators to fits their own community needs.

6. What is your roadmap/timeline? When is the first community migration to community.openstreetmap.org ideally planned?