Hi, During the community building birds of the feather session at the State of the Map, we gathered a group focused on working towards a bigger community.
In the first place, they expressed a need for having a group/channel with which to exchange ideas, experiences and issues that the broader community could help with. Second place, a need to push for a global agenda based on those experiences. There are some issues that all of us deal with, which are often clearly OSMF related. Our job would be to collect these issues, prioritize them, and support OSMF in realizing them (for example by doing the boring stuff ourselves, or by reaching out to other working groups). Third, documenting stuff so more of the experiences are readily available for the others who are starting or facing similar issues. That same morning, the Local Chapters decided to repurpose the local-chapters mailing list for somewhat similar purposes. They decided that would be a good place to start, as well as that non-local chapters would be welcome too. Maybe we can we do this together. >From the input we gathered in the afternoon: The group working on this could have the following as mission: > Collecting and exchanging local community building experience to create and implement a global agenda for OSM and OSMF community growth The strategy: > Attract more people to do the thinking and the working by letting them talk and work how they want to In the community session, our primary focus was doing something that would continue after the session. Given the welcoming attitude of the local chapters, we recommended people register for https://lists.openstreetmap.org/subscribe/local-chapters Since not everyone is comfortable using mailing lists and there is a need for "quick questions" as well as "thorough discussion", we decided to also set up a chat channel. I have set this up using Matrix and connected it to Telegram, Riot and IRC: https://t.me/joinchat/CY4DIhBlSw8bM47ETAT9pw https://riot.im/app/#/room/#osmcommunity:matrix.org IRC: "#osmcommunity on OFTC", URL ircs://irc.oftc.net:6697/osmcommunity Second practical thing is that we need a documenting/planning/outreach tool. The experience of the group present (as well as previous experience by the State of the Map working group) pointed towards using Github for that. @sabas already started doing that, but there was a lot of resistance: https://github.com/openstreetmap/operations/issues/229 In the end, @hbogner created an instance for us at https://github.com/osmfoundation/lcwg . For now, it has a clearly Local Chapters focus, but if you agree, it could be a common thing too. Ideally, the Local Chapters and the community builders can just stick together. But that would require that the Local Chapters can get behind the mission and strategy mentioned before; that they agree to let the expanded membership organise things how they see fit. I hope the Local Chapters members can see us doing these things together. If the Local Chapters Working Group wants a more specific focus and stick to a mailing list only, then we can just part ways, no hard feelings. Personally, I don't like the fragmentation of channels either. But I see no alternative, because the medium is the message. You need to choose your channels in function of what you want to achieve. The disadvantage of fracturing can be adressed by better reporting: e.g. do a weekly/bi-weekly/monthly recap (based on the frequencies of discussions) of the main discussions on the chat channel and put it on the mailing list or some other archive. I hope the input from this group can help us reach a quick conclusion! Basically the choice is between an expanded Local Chapters group and having a minimalist Local Chapters group and a new Community group. P.S. I tried to send this message yesterday, but it was stopped by the mailing list because I also put all the contacts from the community BoF in the conversation. -- Joost Schouppe OpenStreetMap <http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/joost%20schouppe/> | Twitter <https://twitter.com/joostjakob> | LinkedIn <https://www.linkedin.com/pub/joost-schouppe/48/939/603> | Meetup <http://www.meetup.com/OpenStreetMap-Belgium/members/97979802/>
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