Communication Working Group meeting on Tuesday, December 19th, 2017

Participants

harry-wood
jinalfoflia
planemad
nebulon42
andrew
dorothea_

Topics

New CWG members. Welcome!

Andrew and Michael (nebulon42) have joined the CWG. Welcome!

CWG members - introductions

In the IRC log.

New wikimedia skin - update

created by Michael
skin no longer fixed-width
in testing phase, before it goes live for all
currently active as an alternative skin, which people who have OSMF wiki accounts can choose as their default one
github page: https://github.com/osmfoundation/osmf-mediawiki-skin

Suggestions:

centering
colouring of visited links
"Magic-words" (similar to Wordpress "shortcodes") to assist with creating content

We are looking for people to test the new skin! If you have an osmf-wiki account please go here and select the "OSMFoundation" skin. We welcome suggestions on the github issue tracker (one suggestion = one issue please).

Post to apply for State of the Map scholarships

on wordpress (update: blogpost here).
looking for an alternative blogpost image, than the one proposed by SotM-WG

Any Other Business

CWG structure

Harry has been involved the longest and is our unofficial leader
do-ocracry
unofficial specialisation, based on the access each member has to the OSM social accounts and to other platforms

Reaching out

Suggestions:

getting more people outside the OSM community aware of our various communication feeds
inviting tech writers to follow our communication feeds
sending out press releases
noting journalists who have written about OSM before

Action item: Harry to send a spreadsheet with previously listed press contacts

CWG meeting announcements

Action items:

Michael to keep the OSMF wiki updated with the next meeting date and time
Michael to send this meeting's summary to osmf-talk, once the next meeting has been scheduled. Related announcements might be sent to osmf-announce, once it has been reactivated.

Next meeting

Action item: Dorothea to create Doodle for recurring CWG meetings

IRC Log

18:00:55 andrew hi all
18:01:14 dorothea_ hello :)
18:01:23 nebulon42 hi
18:01:30 dorothea_ hi nebulon42 :)
18:02:36 nebulon42 i'm not really used to irc (just to say that up front) :)
18:02:49 dorothea_ no worries :)
18:03:10 jinalfoflia_ Hello everyone :)
18:03:11 dorothea_ andrew, is that your real name too..?
18:03:18 dorothea_ hi jinalfoflia_ ! :)
18:03:37 dorothea_ pinging chrisfl peda planemad rorym Zverik
18:03:44 dorothea_ CWG meeting time :)
18:04:26 planemad haaii :)
18:04:32 andrew yep! I emailed the list and Harry Wood responded
18:04:41 dorothea_ lol hi planemad :)
18:05:22 dorothea_ andrew, thanks :) we're waiting another new member (Tommy), maybe we can give him a few minutes
18:05:36 planemad its close to midnight here, dropping of in a bit
18:06:39 dorothea_ yes, sure.. we'll see if scheduling the meeting earlier works for most, as it doesn't work for Jinal too
18:07:30 dorothea_ Andrew and Michael, first of all welcome! :) Our main pad is at [link]
18:08:05 dorothea_ we mostly use that, and email
18:08:17 nebulon42 Thanks, good to know
18:08:22 dorothea_ we have a github account too, but don't use it much
18:09:04 dorothea_ you might want to read the welcome pad for new CWG members at https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/CWG_meeting_2017-12-19#Welcome_pad_for_new_CWG_members
18:09:44 dorothea_ basically, if you could email the answers to the two top questions, that would be awesome :)
18:09:54 * harry-wood (~harry-woo@***.***.***.***) has joined
18:10:04 dorothea_ hi Harry! :)
18:10:10 harry-wood sorry I'm late
18:10:20 dorothea_ np, we haven't really started :)
18:11:23 dorothea_ I was just mentioning the communication platforms we use
18:11:34 nebulon42 do you want to know my affiliation also if it is completely unrelated to OSM and OSMF?
18:13:21 harry-wood hi nebulon42. Thanks for your help with the new osmfoundation.org skin!
18:13:48 nebulon42 hi harry, np :)
18:13:55 nebulon42 is it already the "new" skin? :)
18:14:31 harry-wood not just yet. but it will be
18:16:24 nebulon42 so, are there some other parts to the intro, just that we don't jump ahead in the agenda
18:17:05 harry-wood Are we intro-ing? OK
18:17:17 harry-wood We have andrew wiseman here too hey?
18:18:13 andrew yep that's me
18:19:08 harry-wood Welcome!
18:19:45 andrew thanks!
18:19:48 harry-wood Did you introduce yourself already?
18:21:05 andrew nope, I'm Andrew, I work for Apple on the Maps team and also teach part time at George Washington University in Washington, DC. I've been an OSM contributor since 2011 and am also active in the local DC OSM community
18:21:42 andrew I've also written for some blogs and websites about maps and geo things, and I'm excited to help out
18:22:07 harry-wood Excellent!
18:22:21 harry-wood So was dorothea_ talking you through some tools we use?
18:22:44 andrew yep, she pointed me at the pad and the CWG wiki
18:22:54 dorothea_ maybe nebulon42 can introduce himself as well..? :)
18:23:03 nebulon42 sorry, yes
18:23:15 harry-wood Yes! Take it away nebulon42! :-)
18:24:48 nebulon42 I'm Michael, living in Austria, working as software and ux architect for a local compay which does web shops for tourism, I'm contributing to OSM since 2013 I think, I'm maintainer of openstreetmap-carto (the main map) although currently "on leave" and CartoCSS, Kosmtik. In general I'm an open source and open data enthusiast.
18:26:07 harry-wood kick ass!
18:26:26 jinalfoflia_ Wow! Welcome Michael :)
18:26:43 harry-wood We have (the famous) planemad here with us. Are you joining CWG planemad?
18:27:00 harry-wood Does planemad work with you jinalfoflia_ ?
18:28:24 jinalfoflia_ Yes harry-wood, planed works with me. Not sure about he joining CWG though
18:28:44 dorothea_ (planemad said when the meeting started that he would drop off, as it is close to midnight there)
18:29:47 jinalfoflia_ Yes :)
18:30:15 harry-wood Who else do we have then? Shall we introduce ourselves to andrew & nebulon42?
18:31:10 harry-wood I'm Harry Wood in London UK. Been trying to keep CWG going for years now through various phases of greater or lesser activity
18:31:30 harry-wood Also in the UK we have chrisfl …up in Scotland I believe?
18:32:00 nebulon42 yes the famous harry-wood ;)
18:32:18 harry-wood Is rorym just lurking? He was in Ireland, but now in Germany
18:32:59 planemad My name is Arun, and got involved making maps of India for Wikipedia articles in 2005 and helping define the earliest cartographic standards for maps on wiki. Later found out about OSM in 2007 and was one of the earliest contributors to the data and helped build awareness about the project in the country. More recently joined Mapbox 3 years ago to build out the data team to contribute to OSM.
18:33:19 harry-wood thanks planemad
18:33:59 planemad hi all!
18:34:12 harry-wood who else? Zverik is an active sorta chap, but maybe just lurking on IRC. He's in Russia. OSMF board member until recently.
18:34:31 harry-wood Peda also helps a lot. Current board member
18:34:34 jinalfoflia_ Hi, I'm Jinal Foflia from Bangalore, India. I have been with OpenStreetMap since last 3 years. I'm also a part of Mapbox team in Bangalore. I have been with CWG since 2016 September
18:35:08 harry-wood And of course…. dorothea_, who is queen of all organisation! :D
18:35:44 harry-wood You're in Greece right dorothea_?
18:35:44 dorothea_ well, not really :p I'm currently living in Athens, Greece. I'm the Administrative Assistant of OSMF but I'm helping here as a volunteer
18:35:53 dorothea_ yeap! :)
18:37:00 harry-wood Good. So that's introductions. What's next on the agenda dorothea_ ? :-)
18:37:18 dorothea_ a question :)
18:37:29 dorothea_ Andrew and Michael, we will add you to the CWG mailing list and to the CWG member list here: https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Communication_Working_Group How would you prefer to be listed on that page? (full name/username)?
18:38:01 nebulon42 username and firstname are okay for me
18:38:27 andrew can I get back to you on that one? I'll have to see if there are Apple PR guidelines and such
18:38:35 dorothea_ sure :)
18:38:39 andrew great
18:38:43 harry-wood For this list: https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Communication_Working_Group#Who_we_are
18:38:58 andrew ok
18:39:33 harry-wood Or should I say https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Communication_Working_Group?useskin=OSMFoundation#Who_we_are. — funky new skin!
18:39:36 dorothea_ next on the agenda is the Wikimedia skin update. Maybe nebulon42/Harry would like to say about the current status?
18:39:52 dorothea_ :)
18:40:20 harry-wood It's looking great nebulon42
18:40:28 harry-wood did you have more changes you wanted to make (fixes)
18:40:44 nebulon42 yes, I discovered a lot of glitches already :)
18:40:57 harry-wood these ones? https://github.com/osmfoundation/osmf-mediawiki-skin/issues
18:41:02 nebulon42 since Tom thankfully merged the PR the skin can now be tried out
18:41:21 nebulon42 those and some I already discovered today when I was playing with the site
18:41:31 nebulon42 thanks for creating me an account btw
18:41:53 nebulon42 so I planned to do a few more iterations with fixes
18:42:05 nebulon42 and of course all your feedback is appreciated
18:42:15 nebulon42 if you are on github it would be great if you could open issues
18:43:06 nebulon42 dorothea_ you pointed out two issues in the e-mail
18:43:34 nebulon42 one was with the colouring of links, those should change colour (get darker) when visited, but maybe that is only visible on my monitor
18:44:02 nebulon42 the other one was about the layout of the main page, I think since the page was optimised for the other skin we should do a few tweaks to it
18:44:30 nebulon42 that's it from me so far :)
18:44:34 harry-wood Yeah. I'm thinking we could just center it as a first thing
18:45:04 harry-wood (to make the layout look good for https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Main_Page?useskin=OSMFoundation I mean)
18:45:35 harry-wood There's probably a few other pages where we've done some table tricks like that
18:45:38 nebulon42 yes, for example as a first step
18:46:17 harry-wood this one still looks alright because it's centered https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Corporate_Members?useskin=OSMFoundation
18:46:41 harry-wood I think mostly it's fine
18:47:02 harry-wood Let's track progress on https://github.com/osmfoundation/osmf-mediawiki-skin/issues
18:47:14 nebulon42 I also thought about creating something like "shortcodes" (same as Wordpress) to assist us with creating content
18:47:33 nebulon42 if that is possible in Mediawiki
18:48:15 nebulon42 https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Magic_words
18:48:26 harry-wood Yeah you can have mediawiki extensions to introduce various new syntax, a bit like wordpress shortcodes
18:48:58 harry-wood We might want to move off mediawiki some time though
18:49:05 harry-wood No need to get too clever with it
18:49:29 harry-wood In fact the bit thing I'd like to see improved with the site is to hide the fact that it is a wiki in the URL
18:49:45 harry-wood 'big' I mean
18:49:45 nebulon42 sure, that would not be a lot of effort though and could be re-written for any other system as the concepts are quite similar
18:49:58 nebulon42 that would be great :)
18:51:17 harry-wood ok
18:51:19 harry-wood what's next?
18:51:47 dorothea_ a bried update about the SotM scholar post
18:51:58 dorothea_ it is on wordpress
18:52:08 dorothea_ and looking for an alternative scholar photo as the proposed one includes two unrelated people
18:52:42 dorothea_ harry-wood, if you have any photos to suggest (except the classic one) it would be great :)
18:52:57 dorothea_ that's it :)
18:54:19 dorothea_ any other topics that someone would like us to discuss now?
18:54:21 harry-wood hmm a photo/image about scholorships
18:54:59 harry-wood On the pad we have a section for blog post ideas
18:55:20 harry-wood so andrew / nebulon42 feel free to add suggestions
18:55:52 dorothea_ ..or start one of them :)
18:56:08 harry-wood I see we still have a "Harry: Write additional questions for Gold Corporate Members" action
18:56:13 harry-wood I need to crack on with that
18:56:42 harry-wood On the blog post ideas I snuck in a "1 million" contributors post
18:56:48 harry-wood I will begin drafting something for that soon
18:56:56 harry-wood since it's rapidly become out of date news
18:57:37 harry-wood simonpoole already blogged it, https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/SimonPoole/diary/43093. so it's just a re-posting of that really (perhaps simplified)
18:58:05 harry-wood and … "The (not so new) new 'request a review' feature + link pascal_n analysis". something we should have blogged about back when it was introduced
18:58:15 harry-wood but we can blog with some stats on how it's being used now
18:58:35 nebulon42 I would have two questions I wrote in an e-mail to the list: I'm curious if there is a internal structure to the working group. Is there a chair (someone who has the last word on controversial topics)? Or is everything done in a way everybody can agree on? Do people specialise on specific things?
19:00:49 harry-wood As I mentioned earlier I've been involved in CWG a long time, so I'm tending to lead things a lot, but we're hopefully mostly in agreement :-)
19:00:57 dorothea_ we have some specialisation, stemming from the accounts that each of us can/wants to access. You can see the section "Accounts' access by CWG members" on the pad
19:01:26 harry-wood …and dorothea_ is more organised than all the rest of us :-)
19:01:39 dorothea_ :p :)
19:02:03 nebulon42 thanks
19:02:20 andrew I had a couple of ideas for things to tweet or blog about. I think in general getting more good news out, like cool examples of organizations, companies, clubs etc. using OSM data or doing projects to create data
19:02:48 harry-wood Yeah that sounds great
19:02:54 andrew and also getting more people outside the OSM community aware of our various communication feeds. maybe inviting tech writers to follow them, or sending out press releases etc (forgive me if that already happens)
19:03:11 harry-wood We do need to up the frequency in general.
19:04:14 andrew cool. like I bet various tech writers or magazines would be interested in the 1 millionth contributor, or being used in Pokemon, if that's indeed try
19:04:18 andrew true*
19:04:52 nebulon42 is it ok for you if I try to keep the CWG page on the OSMF wiki updated with the next meeting date and time? I think that would make it easier for people to casually join in.
19:05:18 harry-wood Yeah good idea!
19:05:29 harry-wood We did a press release things a *little* bit in the past, but didn't tend to achieve much traction
19:05:33 harry-wood Maybe we were doing it wrong
19:06:36 andrew I can start to think of various writers/blogs/magazines to invite to follow us or send items to
19:07:05 harry-wood Sounds good. Actually come to think of it… there is a google spreadsheet somewhere...
19:07:52 andrew cool, that would be awesome
19:08:01 harry-wood yeah I'll email you a link of some "press contacts" we listed
19:08:37 andrew there are also some various humanitarian groups and agencies based in Washington who set up http://osmstories.org and they want to do more of them, it was kind of dormant. those might also be good sources of tings to write about
19:09:30 harry-wood I think it could be interesting to note journalists who have written about OSM before, so we might blast more news at them. That was the idea, but I forgot about it recently
19:10:26 nebulon42 regarding the topic of getting more osmf members involved in WGs: what about going ahead and mailing the osmf-list with a short summary of what we talked about in the last meeting? Would you think of that as spammy?
19:10:41 andrew yeah definitely harry-wood. or map related writers/bloggers
19:12:24 harry-wood nebulon42 yeah could be good. We put out the IRC logs like so: https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/CWG_meeting_2017-12-19
19:13:40 harry-wood ( thanks dorothea_ )
19:13:40 nebulon42 that's good, but is a bit hard to digest, of course summarizing is extra work and someone would have to be tasked with it and maybe others need to agree
19:13:49 dorothea_ maybe WG updates can also be posted on the announce mailing list. The reactivation of the list is a topic on the next board meeting
19:14:05 nebulon42 yeah great idea
19:14:45 harry-wood Well the 'announce' list is for very low frequency announcements I think?
19:15:06 harry-wood but there probably should be *slightly* more frequent announcements
19:15:39 harry-wood https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/osmf-announce/
19:15:44 nebulon42 it's just a thing about knowing what is going on and then you might see something that interests you and want to get involved with
19:15:51 dorothea_ it certainly was, but it will probably change
19:15:52 dorothea_ https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Board/Minutes/2018-01-18#Restart_osmf-announce_and_post_regular_reporting
19:16:05 harry-wood no announcements since 2014 is probably a bit too low frequency :-)
19:16:58 nebulon42 but osmf members were not automatically subscribed to it? have never heard of it before
19:17:17 harry-wood Yeah. it's chicken and egg situation
19:17:30 harry-wood currently there is no chicken or egg :-D
19:17:48 nebulon42 but it could become an egg :)
19:18:11 dorothea_ not sure about the subscription. If it's not automatic, we can suggest to the MWG to include a mention of it on the Welcome mail to new members
19:18:49 harry-wood I think we could post to the osmf-talk list with a very short summary. Nothing to bore people with, but a few sentences and a "If you're interested in these things, come join CWG at their next meeting on Xth February"
19:19:24 harry-wood Speaking of which....
19:19:29 dorothea_ lol :)
19:19:31 harry-wood when shall we have the next meeting?
19:19:34 harry-wood (I need to go)
19:20:16 nebulon42 does everybody suggest dates now? :)
19:20:38 harry-wood can't remember how dorothea_ calculates it
19:20:43 harry-wood mid month Tuesday?
19:20:46 jinalfoflia_ We have a doofle
19:20:51 jinalfoflia_ *doodle
19:21:01 jinalfoflia_ I think some of the meetings had them :)
19:21:25 harry-wood yes. We could doodle again since we have new people joining us
19:21:29 dorothea_ well, we had an oscilating time as we couldn't find an agreeable time. But maybe it would make sense to have a doodle now
19:21:44 dorothea_ (for a recurring meeting)
19:22:04 harry-wood it's still going to be the middle of the night for India Jinal. No escaping it :-)
19:22:13 jinalfoflia_ :D
19:22:32 harry-wood let's arrange something later by email then
19:23:26 harry-wood andrew nebulon42 we're hanging around in this chat room a lot (Although a bit less these days for me since I started a new job)
19:23:34 dorothea_ will anyone take the task of informing the osmf-talk list about this meeting?
19:23:54 nebulon42 since i suggested it I would do it if you are ok with it
19:24:04 harry-wood sounds good!
19:24:07 dorothea_ sure :)
19:24:25 harry-wood (but we need to pick next meeting date first I suppose)
19:24:30 nebulon42 but I will wait until we agreed on the next meeting date, should I?
19:24:37 nebulon42 :)
19:24:43 harry-wood yeah
19:24:43 dorothea_ sounds like a plan :)
19:24:46 andrew that sounds good
19:25:10 andrew also harry can you send me those things you mentioned
19:25:37 harry-wood ok
19:25:41 andrew or just to the email list, whatever works!
19:25:45 dorothea_ Michael and Andrew, do you want to be added to the CWG mailing list with the email address you first contacted us?
19:26:07 andrew sure
19:26:18 harry-wood you got access to do that dorothea_?
19:26:27 nebulon42 yes that is fine
19:26:28 dorothea_ ok, great :) yes, I think so, Harry
19:26:35 harry-wood excellent
19:26:53 jinalfoflia_ Hey everyone, I'm logging off now. It's 1am :) Have a great day ahead!
19:26:56 harry-wood I have access except it takes me about 3 hour to figure out google account admin every time I have to do.
19:27:06 harry-wood Yeah. gotta go too
19:27:17 harry-wood See you all …soon
19:27:27 nebulon42 bye
19:27:41 dorothea_ thanks for the meeting, bye everyone :) and welcome again :)
19:28:16 nebulon42 thanks again :)

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