My community has the exact same long-standing issues that pop-ups every years,
and some mappers told me they left OSM and blame the admins and the community for the complete lack of actions taken to prevent these issues from coming up again.
I believe admins are responsible for proactively stirring conversations and calming down heated discussions, so that community can make decisions together.
Should they however take the blame if no actions are taken and the same issues arise again?
Those two answers are to very different questions. The first came out of a requirement to moderate the OSM talk@ and OSMF talk@ mailing lists (the first line of the link says just that). The second is a response by Frederik / woodpeck to a request by the forum admins to the DWG to resolve an issue in the Greek forum (the context for which is upthread from that link).
If anyone has any remaining questions about this sort of thing then that thread is likely to be the best place to converse, rather than a new thread in “Questions and Answers”; if anything about what I’m describing is unclear then by all means ask here and I’ll try and answer to the best of my ability (with the caveat that I’m not a forum admin, am not a community.osm.org admin, and am not involved in the migration!).
Besides what SomeoneElse has already said, I would strongly suggest that when mentioning issues you give enough context that it is clear what you are referring to.
As it stands now it would be easy, and I’m sure this has already happened, to take your statement as “proof that the OSM community is toxic and scares people away”. Ironically that is often used as an argument by corporate apologists to argue that they should have more control, something which you are actually arguing against.
Would love to get more feedback from OSM experts like you both at the link above.
In a nutshell, how would you deal with the rise of vandalism and a lack of decisions and enthusiasm within a small community?