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Communication channels analysis: Difference between revisions
Communication channels analysis (view source)
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, 13 years agomore detail accross the whole document
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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. One suggested next step, is to document a "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 get 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)
There is no integration with OSM user accounts, e.g. a way to post to mailing lists on the web via that.
==== announce list ====
===Wiki===
Documentation and help information. Publicly editable. Harry has been active (a bit less these days) and trying to manage
There is a need to tread carefully (discuss changes first) around some areas of content to avoid getting embroiled in disputes, but there is also a massive amount of clean-up work which can be carried out without encountering much controversy. This is true throughout the whole wiki and even within the (often controversial) tagging documentation.
Harry has admin status on the wiki along with 14 other people [http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Special:ListUsers/sysop 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.
There is no integration with OSM user accounts. Further investigation and documentation is now needed (should go here: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Single_sign_on ) now that OSM account info can be accessed via OAuth.
==== Template:News ====
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Template:News
A wiki template which was added to the wiki main page, giving very short headline news items. This probably gets noticed by quite a few people, but is not maintained by many people. One problem with this is that important news items can get missed off from this (It's not quite a reliable news channel) The wiki allows more people to join in, which is good on the one hand, but we are already encountering problems with the subjective choice of what is important news. It seems like only a matter of time before this attracts some debates/wiki edit wars, but we seem to be managing OK so far.
See also [http://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/74/is-everybody-allowed-to-post-news-items-in-the-openstreetmap-wiki?page=1#163
Is everybody allowed to post news items in the OpenStreetMap wiki?]
==== 'Community Updates' page ====
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Community_Updates
The "Community Updates" page is a recent 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 is a good idea]) There are a couple of keen contributors, neither of whom can write good English. The fact that errors are not corrected quickly suggests 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.
=== Forum ===
http://forum.openstreetmap.org/
A conventional web forum/message-board system which has been running for some time now. Run by Lambertus. It works fine as a place for discussion, and people who dislike mailing lists tend to wish that more people would move over to using it instead. Lambertus has done some technical tweaks to add RSS functionality. Integrated pretty nicely with OSM accounts. It uses it's own avatars where it could use OpenStreetMap ones (minor technical gripe) There's a [http://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewforum.php?id=8 feedback forum] for suggesting technical improvements.
It has functioned fairly well as a newbies/technical/tagging question & answer site, although this use case is now being usurped by help.openstreetmap.org
=== Q&A site (help.openstreetmap.org) ===
http://help.openstreetmap.org/
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 far 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')
Integrated pretty nicely with OSM accounts, although it uses avatars from gravatar.com rather than OpenStreetMap ones (minor technical gripe)
=== 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. 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.
Several years ago there were some coordinated meetings held on the IRC channel, as a sort of live Q&A session to help newbies. Not sure how well they worked but they seemed to stop happening. http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Mapping_Techniques,_Tips_and_Tricks
=== opengeodata blog ===
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