In one way it can be seen as some fragmentation if the goal is to have a large global forum here, but in another way, it can be seen as fragmenting existing active forums.
For very active local communities or chapters, the 2 levels categories/sub-categories will not fit in a global OSMF forum.
About categories, here is what we have on the OSM-France Discourse:
Introductions
I’m beginning !
Contribute : advanced tools, data sources, photo based
Use: osmand, QGis, uMap
Themes: outdoor, education, public transport
Announcements: OSM-FR, jobs, events, SOTM
OpenStreetMap France
Regions: one sub category per french region
Local groups: one sub-category per active local group
We reused the categories we had in the previous phpBB based version of our forum (which had been transfered to Discourse), and created new ones due to the gradual switch from mailing-lists to Discourse for regions and local groups.
I’d be interested in thematic categories. For example, cycling, humanitarian mapping, long-distance trails, waterways, that sort of thing. A lot of OSM mapping is done by enthusiasts for a particular theme, but at the moment there’s not really any easy way for them to share good practice or learn from each other, particularly across country boundaries. A few have their own international mailing lists but not many.
One more thing Discourse brings is tags/keywords that can be attached to a topic.
You can subscribe to tags, get notifications based on them, select topic with them, etc.
Is it even possible to have tags automatically added based on word lists: someone mentions osmand or umap in its post, the tags are added automatically.
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?
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):