Which are the initial categories we want to enable? Which communities would they support?

In case of migrating OSM forum here we need a “Poland” subforum for Polish community.

(most discussions would be in Polish, with occasional foreign language poster from abroad)

Would it be worth having a forum for the OpenStreetMap Foundation (i.e. as a forum equivalent for osmf-talk@)?

A post was split to a new topic: Import tags from OSM Help

2 posts were split to a new topic: Handling categories and languages

I think mirroring the categories of some mailing lists, like tagging, would be useful. Also regional categories.

For Poland subforum I would propose giving moderator rights to people holding them at forum.openstreetmap.org.

The same may be a good idea for other similar subforums.

Thanks for the ideas Sam. From the categories you suggested:

• How active they are in other existing tools currently?
• Do you think there is/can be desire for a transition from the current tool to this one?
• Are there super active/committed users that could moderate these categories?

Cheers.

How do you think categories should be requested and which requirements should they fit?

We can have local chapters as top level categories to allow them to have sub-categories. Would that work?

That’s great to hear. What do you think should be the requirements to request a category for a community? Are there people over the Polish community who can commit to moderate the category?

Is there a desire from the current channel to transition over here? What would be the scope for this category? Are there a few people who can commit to moderate it?

Thanks for the suggestion. How do you think communities or groups should request new categories? What requirements they should have?

Hello!
It’d be good to have an OSM-related tech category, similar to #imagery-and-resources on the OSM World discord ^-^

Thanks for the suggestion.

• What’s the current activity of this channel?
• Do you think there is potential desire to transition to these forums?
• Are there people who could commit to moderate the category here?

Maybe a thread under this category for requesting, with a template that can be used? There should also be a demonstratable use for the category, and inactive ones should be archived.

As for the imagery-resources, it’s pretty active, mainly used for discussing imagery layers, and I’m sure there are people who’d be willing to moderate (I can help if needed).

As for users migrating from the mailing lists, I’m unsure. OSM has conventionally been more accepting than other FOSS related community on adopting new technologies (e.g. IRC is basically unused, Discord and Matrix are being used more and more), but the mailing lists have become so engraved into the community it might be hard for a switch.

It is a key goal of this platform to offer local chapters and communities, such as OSM France, an opportunity to have their conversations on OSMF-hosted infrastructure and reduce the fragmentation between different communication channels. So I hope we can find ways to make this platform work for you! If it’s not suitable, then IMO we would have to reconsider the platform’s architecture.

I suspect the limit on nesting categories is one of the biggest challenges here. Do you think your category hierarchy could be flattened?

For example, the “Regions” category seems to mostly exist to give more structure to the category page, not so much as a category in which one would post directly. It seems to be possible, albeit a bit hacky, to group categories below a heading as an alternative way of giving structure to them (I’m thinking of the CSS solution – not solution in the last post):

Also, there is nothing stopping us to have biggest/high traffic communities with a top level category and their own subcategories if needed.

Thanks for the idea, I’ve started with a This forum issues and requests subcategory to get all issues and requests (With tags to differentiate), we can always split into a separate category-request subcategory if needed in the future.

One of the criteria will be the migration of all the content we have (26K+ posts, 4K+ topics) and all the accounts (1K).
There’s many tool to migrate existing phpBB/fluxBB and other BB to Discourse. Is there something similar to migrate a Discourse into another Discourse ?

Our Discourse instance has been setup one year ago by migrating all the content from a 12+ year old phpBB.

Oops… maybe I missed something !

Are you considering migrating the (almost inactive) forum at users: France - OpenStreetMap Community Forum or merging forum.openstreetmap.fr into community.openstreetmap.org ?

There are no current plans to migrate any content.

Unfortunately people jumped the gun on launching this somewhat and OWG didn’t have a chance to revisit the question of what if any data should be migrated - we have discussed it in the past but it was quite a long time ago and I can’t remember what conclusions we reached.

That was purely about osm.org content though - stuff from forum.openstreetmap.org, help.openstreetmap.org and lists.openstreetmap.org. I don’t believe we have ever considered bringing in content from third party sites.