Yeah, as Tom commented, there are currently no plans for content migration, but rather encourage and support transitions to the new tool.
The conversation about content migration happened a few times and it was clear that the amount of work and complexity was too high compared with the outcome.
Having the old content hosted/served as a html/static site can help preserve content for historical purposes and, at the same, allow the new forums to be clean and tidy from the start.
This is what some big forums have done in the past, since it’s unlikely that 5 year-old discussions/questions are relevant anymore, and in any case they can always be linked to start a new fresh and updated conversation.
Are there any specific concern with this approach? We can talk about this on a separate topic if there are more people who are not sure about this approach.
tools & software subgroups, e.g. ID, JOSM, Overpass, etc.
specific interest groups, e.g. HOT, etc.
i’m particularly interested in OpenHistoricalMap seeing as i’m on the advisory board, but most any well identified special interest deserves serious consideration. look to slack and discord groups for a list of candidates.
As a new contributor last year, it took me a long time to understand how region-specific and country-specific forums work. Among the causes I can list a year later, there are:
the existence of forums managed by local chapters vs forums for local chapters managed by OSMF, on which you tend to focus;
but also the confusion between languages and regions. Having been raised in open source communities, I was not interested specifically about France. It’s only after discovering that my favorite topic (hiking) was only discussed in languages I can’t read that I fell back on the (very active) French-speaking community to try and find other people interested in the same topics. It’s only after some time that I understood that for many contributors language is an issue.
the (non-existent) parallel with the wiki did not help either. There again it took me some time to understand the difference between FR: and France/
In my opinion this topic is far more reaching than just organizing the forum categories. It decides whether OSM is an international community or a set of national communities that send delegates at the international level. The current situation definitely fosters innovation in tags, but also cultural fragmentation; I’m still unclear why there are so many tag/relation patterns for hiking routes, for instance. Unfortunately I have no solution to propose, just this analysis to share.
Maybe it would be helpful to describe what would be your perfect experience as a contributor, trying to imagine a perfect future environment? How would it look like? (don’t be constrained about the current situation or tools, just describe your ideal contributor journey)
Is there a specific place listing all of these channels we should be looking into? Which requirements you think we should ask for categories to be approved?
Now obviously I don’t suggest we copy verbatim all the channels, but I think some, are quite useful. Especially things like a wiki channel, imports, etc. Some of the OSM mailing lists may also be useful.
I would say that community dynamics on synchronous tools (chats) don’t usually behave the same as asynchronous ones like this discourse (or mailing lists), but it can give us a sense on where the community is most active. Thanks.
I’m not familiar with the structure in discourse yet but would it make sense to have a category for “Thematics” and ‘sub-categories’ for each of these topics (trails, humanitarian, teaching, etc)?
i’d kind of like to see some actual categories set up. some are obvious - discussion areas for specific commonly used tools (as i said, JOSM, ID, Overpass…). and discussion areas for various sub projects and side projects (OHM, TeachOSM, the sea mapping and rail mapping efforts…). and of course, there is always a need for a place to argue about tagging.
I see it differently. One should strive as a distant goal the harmonization of communication and not only Help & Forum integrieten here, but also migrate the mailing lists… With the functionalities of Discourse someone can participate by mail if necessary (who still needs it in the 21st century).
We need to think about channel transitions. In my experience having two channels for the exact same purpose lead to no incentives for people to transition and user/content fragmentation.
If there is a desire for using this Discourse from any mailing list, I suggest that a smooth transition plan with an old-tool retirement date should be considered.
The set up of the current forum is not that bad; at least national sub-forums where users can interact in their native language on mostly local topics I prefer a lot.
Some topical fora as cycling, building, geology/geography (English language?) I think okay.
Closed sub-fora for specialist topics (e.g. the Dutch building import forum group); possibly even hidden to non-members I appreciate.