Steve Friedl writes:
There is no single solution that will please or attract everybody; speaking for myself, if the only way to participate is to join yet another forum, I'm pretty sure I would not bother, and in practice these side forums often fail to develop a critical mass sufficient to make it thrive.
So, recognizing that "side forums" do and will exist, support them (with ideas like a Facbook bot that rolls into a central-to-OSM repository those discussions in their own "room.")
I do understand that many don't care for Facebook, and the tone of some is similar to the frothing anti-Microsoft rants of the GNU folks, and that's fine for them, but not everybody feels that way, and avoiding a large pool of willing participants - especially the younger ones - just because not everybody will choose to play seems like a missed opportunity.
I'm not saying to avoid, just make things more OSM-centric, and watch as people flock there. Not everyone will, I recognize, but tools that plug into them and "flow back" can reduce or even eliminate missed conversations being "islanded" in one place vs. existing at the "definitive" (OSM-centric) locus. Yes, this comes at a price of modest effort and duplication of threads, but initial costs can be small, and bandwidth/storage are cheap.
Sometimes one has to choose between being right or being effective, and this sounds like one of those times.
I don't know about that, I'm saying we can do both: right AND effective. Some initial effort is involved, (as it always is) and then it can run largely on auto-pilot -- some administration and maintenance -- and those costs remain relatively small.
Is this much different than the many forum-style softwares that are out there? An organization/project as big as ours would need it to scale to a relatively large size, but that can be done. Should such a system have a modular approach to importing data from other platforms, well, Bob's Your Uncle (a successful result is obtained).
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