Communication channels analysis

As part of the early scoping work for the Communication Working Group, this group needs to summarise the different communications channels in and around OpenStreetMap, the difficulties and problems with each of them, and early ideas for tackling problems. The primary intention is to inform decisions around scope. This document can also be regarded as a published output of the working group however....

Status: Currently this is a half-finished work in progress

Mailing lists

talk / dev / license etc

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Mailing_lists We have lots of them. 95 different lists shown on the system.

The "talk" mailing list and to a lesser extent the "dev" mailing list, have always functioned as the "main" communication channel of OpenStreetMap. This is for both two way conversational communication and for announcements.

An often cited problem is that announcements made this way can easily get lost in the noise, and indeed the noise prevents many people attempting to keep up with the talk and dev main mailing lists (Harry sympathises with this viewpoint, and has never attempted to follow any mailing lists, with the result that he misses out on some announcements) Many of the other communication channels are attempts to tackle this problem.

A small minority of users have been known to post far too often, in breach of normal mailing list etiquette. This can be see within user posting stats (Question: user stats link?) These users contributes significantly to the noise factor, although all conversational postings add up to a net-squared effect of ever increasing chatter as more new joiners sign up to the mailing list.

The mailing list is also blighted by argumentative postings which is perhaps inevitable. Sadly it puts out a negative impression to any newcomers. Newbies were encouraged to move to the newbies mailing list, partly to decrease noise, but partly to attempt to present a more friendly face to these people. Sadly the newbies list is not without its arguments either.

The label of "trolling" is bandied around very easily, but in some cases there are accusations of deliberate and malicious attempts to undermine the effectiveness of the mailing list. It may be in some people's nature to needlessly start arguments, but clear-cut cases of malicious mailing list use could be tackled with this use of blocking privileges. So far this has never been necessary, but sadly the project may be growing towards that point. Steve's "poisonous people" post describes these problems.

announce list

http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/announce/ A mailing list just for announcements. Clearly for this to be effective, it should not involve any discussion, and postings should be important project announcements, for some definition of "important". This means that unimportant things should no appear there, but also important things MUST appear there. So far people seem to be using it fairly sensibly. Maybe a little too many merkaartor point release announcements, but important announcements don't always make it onto there. Question: Is public posting allowed?

osmf-talk

http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/osmf-talk/ Chit chat about the foundation. This may be particularly relevant to the Communications Working Group.

Other

There is also osmf-announce, but this seems to be broken/decommissioned

Wiki

Documentation and help information. Publicly editable. Harry has been active (a bit less these days) and trying to manage things like changes to the Main Page, and steering "cleanup" activities. He has admin status on there along with 14 other people Special:ListUsers/sysop. We can block people. So far nobody has misbehaved to that extent apart from spammers. However some people have come close, through pushing their own point of view or overriding attempts to follow a process. These difficulties are mostly around disputed tagging documentation.

IRC

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/IRC#IRC - Chat rooms. There's quite a lot of possible chat rooms listed. You can actually spawn a new chat room just be entering a different name, so there's nothing to stop new ones being added to the list, but #osm, #osm-dev, #osm-de are the ones with some traffic. They function reasonably well as a place for newbies to ask questions, but whether newbies feel invited to do so is another question. Some similar problems with other channels with individual users talking too much

opengeodata blog

Question: Is this domain name still owned by Steve Coast?

foundation blog

http://blog.osmfoundation.org/ - A grand total of two blog posts. We need to take a decision to revive this as meaningful blog or decommission it. At one stage there were some complaints that OpenGeoData.org was owned by Steve Coast, and this is not appropriate as the main blog of OpenStreetMap. The OSMF blog may have been set up as a reaction to that. Grant set it up. We should ask him about it.

foundation wiki

http://www.osmfoundation.org/ We should talk with Grant about this (he set up the wiki). As discussed, MediaWiki was probably as a simple CMS choice for the foundation site, but looking so similar to wiki.openstreetmap.org creates confusion. We don't want to confusingly duplicate content of the main wiki, but we also don't want to aim to grow content in the same way. We don't really want a wiki-style sprawling knowledgebase on the foundation site. It's more of a CMS situation, than a knowledgebase situation. Maybe we should move a way from using a wiki (e.g. drupal or wordpress instead) Where wiki style collaboration is useful, we could use the main wiki. Alternatively if we stick with MediaWiki, we should at least make the wiki look very different from the main wiki (skin). Perhaps think about non-open permissions.