Communication channels analysis: Difference between revisions

A small minority of users have been known to post far too often, in breach of normal mailing list etiquette. This can be seeseen within user posting stats (''Question: user stats link?'') These users contributescontribute 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 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 useabuse could be tackled with this use of blocking privileges. So far this has neverrarely been necessary, but sadlya theblocks projectwere mayused bein growingsome towardscases thatmore pointrecently. Steve's "poisonous people" post describes these problems. OneSometimes suggestedthere nextare step,calls isfor toa documentmore adetailed "code of conduct" for mailing list use.

Email addresses of posters are revealed. The system also requires to register with your 'from' address, which can be more difficult to set up as a throw-away address. The email addresses getgets published on the web archive although with some minimal anti-scraping obfuscation. This doesn't seem to bother many people, so presumably sp@mmers haven't figured it out yet (or don't tend to find the archives)

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 nonot 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-talkannounce ====

==== Otherosmf-talk ====

Documentation and help information. Publicly editable. Harry has been active (a bit less these days) and trying to manage some aspects of the wiki. The [http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/WikiProject_Cleanup WikiProject cleanup page] lays out some of the broad brushstroke information on the various objectives of the wiki, and goes on to provide guidelines. There is more work to do on wiki guidelines. It can be a sensible place to start, in the hope that the community of editors can then gradually shift things to conform with the guidelines. This is a better approach than attempting any silver-bullet rapid cleanup initiatives.

The "Community Updates" page iswas a recentan initiative to post rolling news items on the wiki, including summaries of recent mailing list discussion ([http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Things_to_do#Task:_Mailing_list_weekly-digest which iswas a good idea]) There arewere a couple of keen contributors, neither of whom can write good English. The fact that errors arewere not corrected quickly suggestssuggested low readership, but this could change. As with Template:News, the wiki allows more people to join in, which is good on the one hand, but we may encounter problems with the subjective choice of what is important news, and the stylistic/literary choices involved in summarising. However enthusiasm dried up and no further updates happened since 2011

Question and answer site. It uses the Stack Overflow system, which resembles sites like "Yahoo! answers", with votable answers, but also blending in aspects of forums, wikis, and point-based badge games. It's pretty new. Launched by Tom Hughes during SOTM 2010, and so farit seems to be working really well. People new to this format may struggle to understand it. It was recently linked from the OpenStreetMap homepage (the word 'help')

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 beby 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. The IRC channel seems to alternate between too much conversation traffic, and nothing at all. Some similar problems with other channels with individual users talking too much.

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