CWG meeting 2018-03-08

From OpenStreetMap Foundation

Communication Working Group meeting on Thursday 8th March 2018

Topics

  • OSMF wiki e-mail validation
  • Translation of OSMF site
  • Tech base for OSMF site
  • Responses to common inquiries
  • Press releases

IRC log

dorothea: let's start :)
nebulon42: Maybe Severin might join us as he wanted to know how to translate OSMF wiki pages.
dorothea: sure, let
dorothea: 's discuss that topic later then
nebulon42: sure
dorothea: are there any action item updates?
andrew: The one million contributors post is ready to go, Harry has a schedule for it
dorothea: that's great :)
dorothea: Tordanik wrote the GSoC blogpost.. Tordanik, would you like to send the link to the CWG list for feedback from other people as well?
Tordanik: Sure, will do that later today.
dorothea: great :)
nebulon42: RSS-button: what's about that?
andrew: A bunch of the items are harry so maybe we can come back to them
dorothea: that was an old proposal by me, to have an RSS button visible on the blog (as far as I remember). We provide an RSS feed, but there's no button visible
andrew: Ah that would be neat
nebulon42: https://github.com/harry-wood/osmblog-wp-theme/issues/3
dorothea: yeap :)
nebulon42: I'll have a look.
dorothea: thank you :)
nebulon42: So we should re-invite Tommy for the next meeting then?
andrew: Good idea
dorothea: yes
nebulon42: btw is the date/time issue settled by now?
dorothea: it seems to be the most convenient date/time according to the doodle, but it's a shame that it doesn't work for Chris (and probably Jinal)
dorothea: let's stick with it and we can review in a couple of meetings
nebulon42: yes bad that it does not work for everyone, but I think it is important that there is a regular schedule and we know when it will be
dorothea: yes, that's true
dorothea: the first agenda item is related to OSMF wiki new account creation: Upon registration to prompt the user to confirm e-mail before 1st edit, otherwise the edit fails (suggested by Joost via email)
dorothea: what do you think..? can anyone have a look at it..?
--> sev_osm (~severin@154.124.86.59) hat den Channel #osm-cwg betreten
nebulon42: Hi Severin
dorothea: hi Severin :)
nebulon42: is it a big issue for new wiki editors?
nebulon42: I have not noticed it
sev_osm: Hi everybody
sev_osm: Sorry for being late
<-- andrew (~oftc-webi@2600:1003:b00c:af49:2405:6bf1:e4b2:f950) hat den IRC verlassen (Remote host closed the connection)
nebulon42: don't worry :)
nebulon42: we are just discussing the first agenda item on https://pads.ccc.de/g7GLxB7ckz
dorothea: it might be in cases where the user who registers spends a lot of time editing the first page and then it fails.. Not sure how often this happens. It is probably a nice to have feature
nebulon42: that is after "action item updates"
--> andrew (~oftc-webi@2600:1003:b00c:af49:2405:6bf1:e4b2:f950) hat den Channel #osm-cwg betreten
nebulon42: if it is a mediawiki feature and only has to be enabled I guess it is easy, otherwise could be hard to do
--> diakhasso (~diakhasso@vsr56-1-82-246-46-241.fbx.proxad.net) hat den Channel #osm-cwg betreten
nebulon42: or should there be a general "warning" text?
dorothea: maybe a warning on the registration page "please confirm your email first before editing"
--> harry-wood (~harry-woo@193.173.114.87.dyn.plus.net) hat den Channel #osm-cwg betreten
dorothea: hi diakhasso and Harry :)
harry-wood: hello
Zverik hi
diakhasso: Hey all !
harry-wood: Sorry I forgot I should've been hurrying home for the meeting
dorothea: hi Ilya :)
dorothea: we were talking about the first agenda item which is related to OSMF wiki new account creation: Upon registration to prompt the user to confirm e-mail before 1st edit, otherwise the edit fails (suggested by Joost via email)
harry-wood: The edit fails hey? that's annoying
dorothea:  :)
<-- andrew (~oftc-webi@2600:1003:b00c:af49:2405:6bf1:e4b2:f950) hat den IRC verlassen (Remote host closed the connection)
nebulon42: where is the registration page?
harry-wood: There's probably a mediawiki "System message" we can tweak to make it tell people to confirm their email.
sev_osm: I did not try creating an account yet
harry-wood: I dont regard this as a high priority problem since there's only a few people who have access to edit the wiki
dorothea: hm.. actually it is a registration email.. Harry usually creates the accounts and an automatic email is sent
--> andrew (~oftc-webi@161.253.124.191) hat den Channel #osm-cwg betreten
andrew: hi all, keep getting cut off
nebulon42: accounts are invitation only on the OSMF wiki
harry-wood: yes. Come to think of it, if we "create by email" a new account I'm surprised a confirmation is necessary. Doesn't really make sense.
nebulon42: I don't remember if I confirmed my e-mail. I guess not.
nebulon42: That's why I meant I didn't run into the problem.
nebulon42: are we sure that the OSMF wiki was meant?
harry-wood: Well we created an account for Joost on there recently
nebulon42: makes sense :)
harry-wood: Shall I get him describe to me exactly what went wrong? sounds a bit strange
nebulon42: that would be great
harry-wood: More importantly… when will we switch to your nice new skin design newbulon42?
andrew: yeah! it looks great
nebulon42: ah yes, didn't have time lately to work on it
nebulon42: there is a last "blocker", the interactive editor does not work, don't know why
nebulon42: try to get that sorted until the next meeting
harry-wood: I never use the interactive editor myself, but yeah I guess others do
nebulon42: and there was an issue by simon that the font looks strange: https://github.com/osmfoundation/osmf-mediawiki-skin/issues/6
nebulon42: anybody noticed something similar?
harry-wood: I think it's not a problem on a retina screen. I have a snazzy retina screen these days. Are you on retina nubulon?
nebulon42: only FHD :)
nebulon42: but might be a Windows problem, maybe I can tweak some font rendering settings
harry-wood: Maybe it's something we can refine later
nebulon42: Maybe
harry-wood: what's next on the agenda?
dorothea: "Translation of OSMF wiki content (board meeting minutes)"
nebulon42: yes, before we move on, we have one or two guests today: Severin and diakhasso
dorothea: welcome :)
sev_osm: Thank you :)
diakhasso: Thanks dorthea and all
diakhasso: I am nicolas by the way
nebulon42: Hi Nicolas
sev_osm: As you may know, I am interested by translating documents from the OSMF wiki into French
diakhasso: and like Severin interested into translating into French OSMF materials so that they can be better known in Africa and Haiti
andrew: what do we need to do?
andrew: sounds like a good idea
nebulon42: The main OSM wiki does well with multilingual content altough not every page might be available in every language. Does this work equally well for the OSMF wiki?
sev_osm: How woudl this work, I mean both technically + is there a validation process to ensure translations from the EN documents do match with the original text?
nebulon42: Apart the normal wiki editing process I'm pretty sure that there isn't anything additional in place. It would be in the responsibility of the translator.
andrew: they would need to have something that would tell them when something is updated, maybe an RSS feed?
harry-wood: I think so far we don't have much of the (wiki) website content translated. Just the about page https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/About and maybe one or two others
harry-wood: implemented as a "/fr" postfix on the page title. This is not a "namespace" set up in the wiki software or anything like that
harry-wood: But it sort of works ok
nebulon42: that means it is sort of hacked in?
dorothea: I have to disappear in 5 minutes for an LWG meeting. Before I do so, first of all many thanks, translating documents is a lot of work. Regarding the minutes, maybe we can add a green box on the top emphasising that the official minutes are in English?
harry-wood: Well not even that. The page content has "[[About/nl]] [[About/fr]] [[About/de]] [[About/it]] [[About/jp]] [[About/ru]]" written in the wiki text
harry-wood: Is it the minutes you are interested in translating?
nebulon42: thanks dorothea
sev_osm: not only the minutes, but also the main documents explaining what the OSMF is, what it does and does not
nebulon42: So it might be beneficial to put the whole translating business of the OSMF wiki on a new technical basis?
nebulon42: otherwise we might regret that later on :)
diakhasso: that's why we are asking the best ways abead for all of us on this one
harry-wood: Well it might be beneficial to put the whole website on a new technical basis, i.e. move off mediawiki. We'd be better off running a static site with pull request changes really
nebulon42: Jekyll :)
harry-wood: yes
nebulon42: But not everyone is a dev that is comfortable with Github and the like
harry-wood: We're not really interested in building a heavily interlinked knowledge base. It's mostly just a brochure website, so wiki is an over-engineered solution which is already encouraging a bit too much sprawling mess of content
harry-wood: The ability for people to easily edit is only of concern when it comes to adding minutes, which happens reasonably regularly from a few different (perhaps non-technical) users
nebulon42: yes, and that should be flexible enough since putting minutes online is already a chore
harry-wood: But I think non technical users would be able to dump minutes into an "issue" for others to make a pull request out of. It would work fine
nebulon42: we could think of a workaround for sure
nebulon42: I'd like the simplicity of that one
--> planemad (~planemad@49.205.219.92) hat den Channel #osm-cwg betreten
harry-wood: That idea would be a bit of work, but it's the direction to go in eventually I think.
sev_osm: So would I
harry-wood: In the meantime we're on a wiki, and we add translations by creating pages with a "/fr" postfix, and linking them at the top
nebulon42: ok, the most realistic way forward is to keep the existing translation "system" in the short run so we could get started with additional french translations
harry-wood: yes
nebulon42: and keep on pushing the other way forward I think
sev_osm: I am used to the wiki process with fr prefix for pages in French like in the OSM wiki
diakhasso: likewise
diakhasso: So I guess, what we will need is a wiki account.
harry-wood: "is there a validation process to ensure translations from the EN documents do match with the original text?" ….is still a problem
nebulon42: unlikely that we can solve that
andrew: i think we'd just need more eyes on it. is there a french speaking board member who could check?
diakhasso: how has it been hqndled for other languages so far ?
diakhasso: and yep I agree with you andrew
harry-wood: Well it's less of a problem for key content pages. They're translated and if they're translated wrongly people would tell us over time
diakhasso: that's right
harry-wood: but if we want to regularly translate meeting minutes, then this might raise issues with people's words being…. mistranslated
nebulon42: yes, I agree, maybe only summarise minutes?
harry-wood: dorothea's suggestion "green box on the top emphasising that the official minutes are in English" would help
sev_osm: OSM FR being now an OSMF oficial chapter, the validation may be done through them
andrew: that's a good idea harry-wood
nebulon42: yes, might work via OSM FR
nebulon42: I think for the minutes we would have to involve the board on the translation issue beforehand
harry-wood: Yes. I think so too
diakhasso: likewise
sev_osm: I mean for the stable pages, not the minutes for which the green light seems indeed a good idea
nebulon42: other pages are not a problem I think
harry-wood: ok I will consult with the board and we'll discuss what to do about it from there
harry-wood: Can we move onto the next agenda item?
nebulon42: do we wait on the board or let severin and nicolas already start on some other pages?
harry-wood: yeah
harry-wood: I'll have to go at in 15 mins. Do we have other urgent items?
nebulon42: next items are by Andrew?
andrew: the next one was that we get a lot questions like "can I use the map in my article" or whatever. maybe we should have some kind of canned response
harry-wood: There has been a few of those came in recently
nebulon42: would not hurt to have some templates
andrew: like "If you are just using an image of the map from OpenStreetMap.org or the data in your own map, you are free to do so, just add (c) map contributors" or whatever. "If you are using another version of the map from another site, please refer to their guidelines in addition to adding (c) map contributors"
andrew: because some questions were just can i use a screenshot of OSM, which is totally fine. another one was some weather map that was built using OSM data which is a different thing
harry-wood: Yes. I think we should write a canned response. Where would we keep it? Google doc? wiki page?
andrew: anywhere is fine with me
nebulon42: wiki page might be better than Google Doc
harry-wood: There probably *is* a wiki page with such things. Just need to know what to search for :-)
andrew: sounds good, we should just make sure nobody edits it with bad stuff
andrew: haha right harry-wood
andrew: but i think the key is giving the requester something simple and straightforward so they want to do it and keep doing it :) at least for simple things
harry-wood: yeah. We should get LWG to cast their eye over the wording too though
andrew: definitely
harry-wood: simonpoole was telling us off for not being legally clear in some responses :-)
andrew: yeah. we'll need to find a balance between legalese and making it clear and easy to read
nebulon42: that's why I pointed towards legal all the times, so he could be precise :)
andrew: right, definitely a good idea. but i think a template will help so they don't get as many emails and we can respond quickly
harry-wood: In fact LWG might have a set of canned responses stored somewhere. We should ask them
harry-wood: I mean we might not use exactly the same responses but could use some bit and/or share the same place
nebulon42: joining forces is always good
harry-wood: Fancy taking the lead on that mission andrew?
andrew: sure thing
harry-wood: you could chat to simonpoole (chair of LWG) about it on IRC. He's on IRC a lot
andrew: okey doke
andrew: the next one was related, sending out press releases about some of the blog posts. we have a list of people who have already written about OSM so that might mean they are more likely to write about it
andrew: I don't think I can send it due to work stuff but I can write the press releases if someone else wants to
andrew: I figure it's only a small amount of effort, just sending some emails, and may result in some nice articles :)
harry-wood: Not allowed to send such things for you work account hey?
harry-wood: Well one of us can help with that I'm sure
andrew: right, that would be great
harry-wood: I emailed you all about press releases earlier, saying it hasn't been that successful in the past. But maybe it's a numbers game
andrew: I think we might want to put a quote from a board member in the press release to
andrew: oh right, I saw that. yeah, I think maybe just trying a bunch of people might give us some more success
harry-wood: quotes from board members we should actually try to do more of in our blog posts too
andrew: good point
harry-wood: Right… I have to go I'm afraid
andrew: I used to do some blogging, to me the best press releases were ones that I could write an article about easily, I could just take quotes and facts directly from it
andrew: see you later harry-wood!
nebulon42: bye harry
harry-wood: I'm over-running my deadlines today. Important one: Time to give the kid a bath :-)
harry-wood: catch you later
<-- harry-wood (~harry-woo@193.173.114.87.dyn.plus.net) hat den IRC verlassen (Quit: Leaving.)
nebulon42: is there something left we should discuss?
andrew: I think that was the last action item. Anyone else have anything?
nebulon42: no
nebulon42: Next meeting would be April 12h
nebulon42: so if there is nothing more coming up, thanks for joining us today Nicolas and Severin
andrew: yes, thanks!
diakhasso: thanks all, hope to be with you April 12th and hear back from Board for the translation work
diakhasso: Excellent evening to all!
nebulon42: great, progress tends to be a bit slow at OSMF but there is progress :)
nebulon42: so I'm off too, have a good evening
nebulon42: or afternoon andrew :)