<div dir="ltr"><div>Hi</div><div><br></div><div>Maybe my experience as "recent" newcomer helps a bit.<br></div><div>I joined proj and gdal-dev mailing lists in 2020. I was using them actively at work, and I had some questions. I am old-school mailing list user. At that time also were my first tiny PRs in PROJ and PROJ-data.</div><div>My first FOSS4G was in Florence, where I finally met some people in person that I only read on emails (Even, Howard, Kristian...) and knew other new people (Michael, Iván, Jorge, ...)</div><div>After Kosovo, 2023, Ivan nominated me as "Charter member" (nonsense name, btw). For that process I needed the osgeo account, ldap, wiki, and so on.</div><div>The mantra thing to avoid undesired people seemed old fashioned, and exactly because of that probably effective. It works for a small group, but there are not that many new members. Is that too much work?<br></div><div> Even before becoming a member I had "donated" a repo to osgeo in github without having the account in <a href="http://osgeo.org">osgeo.org</a>.<br></div><div>Later I used my account only to access discourse, configure it properly for the mail notifications, and that's all.</div><div><br></div><div>In summary: you can be active and not use the account. For me it is mailing list, github, (and mastodon to have some fun).</div><div><br></div><div>Regarding the age of the people, I was happy that I was not the older in the group (that is the case at my office, for instance). There is other people with grey hair or beard in the meetings. Said that, I do not know why less young people is joining osgeo projects. Are they already mature? Geodesy is very complicated? (well, many colleagues say that to me). Projects are too complex? (yes, the are. Looking at QGIS or GDAL code is intimidating, or even scares). Less C++ coders? (I am thinking now on QGIS, GDAL, PROJ. I know there are other languages)<br></div><div><br></div><div>(now reading my story, maybe I am not that recent newcomer).</div><div><br></div><div>Cheers,<br></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Sat, 28 Sept 2024 at 13:22, Even Rouault <<a href="mailto:even.rouault@spatialys.com" target="_blank">even.rouault@spatialys.com</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><u></u>
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<pre>This is my main concern. I don't want our LDAP polluted with people that signup and never use their account for anything or worst yet use it to clutter our wiki or our website with junk, though I guess to strk's point, we could just setup an expiration rule so accounts expire if they have not be used for a while. So cloudflare turnstile is not going to do that for us.
If they don't need any of our services or want to publish their profile "IN GOOD FAITH" on our website then I don't want them to have an account. By GOOD FAITH I mean not just an advertisement.</pre>
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Yeah, my reaction is that perhaps the "Create an OSGeo account"
concept is rarely needed, and maybe the Create an account button
shouldn't be obvious to find. It would be odd that someone new to
want their relationship with OSGeo to start by creating a wiki page
about them. You engage with OSGeo because there's one particular
project that is of interest for you. But we would need a way for
projects to be able to easily give a way for people that do really
need an account to do that (admittedly one way to engage might be to
want to be able to create a ticket about the immediate issue that
you face... so yes for projects still using Trac, an easy way to get
a Trac account is definitely a must)<br>
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<pre>I really would like them to join mailing lists <a href="http://lists.osgeo.org" target="_blank">lists.osgeo.org</a> and <a href="http://discourse.osgeo.org" target="_blank">discourse.osgeo.org</a> and interact with those to prove they are good citizens before we waste our time with them.
I know it sounds very elitists of me, but I'm really discouraged by the lack of long standing people around here. I don't see many new faces sticking around (aside from yours Laurentiu which is kinda new) that puts in a good amount of effort to help out in a long long while. It's always the same old faces. Yes we have more people using our software and providing patches, but I was much happier 10 years ago when people felt more REAL.
Now all these people feel like strangers -- random patch here or there if that much and never to be seen again.
If there are those 0.05% of people out there that were the kind of personalities we had years ago, I'd gladly trade 95% of new traffic for them.</pre>
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<p>I'm glad to hear that and I totally share this sentiment. It is
hard to measure objectively, but I do believe we (OSGeo) have this
"grey-hairing" issue. Not sure if this has been discussed and
analyzed. Do we scare away potential new contributors, or do the
techs we use look out-fashioned to newcomers/youngsters? Or do
we, "old faces", take too much room... ? One issue might also be
that most of our flagship projects are so mature now that they are
too complex to approach and it is really difficult for someone
with less experience to find something accessible to hack. Making
"CI green" requires a lot of tenacity (not saying we should
abandon that. It *is* definitely a huge asset needed for having
rock solid projects). I also find the amount of discussions on
mailing lists (hard to tell if it is true if you sum up to
activity on other forums that serve similar purposes) has severely
decreased compared to 10+ years. Like QGIS is a immensely popular
project, but the traffic on qgis-dev is ridiculously low (Totally
unscientific sampling, but only 39 posts for September 2024!
Apparently about to be the month with the lowest amount of traffic
since the mailing list creation! Exactly 10 years ago, it was 443
! And QGIS use has exploded probably by a 5x to 10x factor in the
meantime. Actually looking at
<a href="https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/qgis-developer/" target="_blank">https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/qgis-developer/</a>, "something"
seems to have happened around 2021). Sure a lot of it has been
moved to topical tickets/pull requests, but I don't know where
forums for general discussions are. Where are you people :-) ... ?
Is using mailing lists so difficult? (or are people so sick of it
because overwhelmed under them in their day job that they actively
hate the medium?) And personally I don't really find Discourse to
really solve the issue (but yeah, let's experiment that for those
who want to give it a try). One advantage I find with email is
that there's not this feeling of "immediateness" you have with
other medium. It takes some time to write an email. The time
needed to sort out ideas...</p>
<pre cols="72">--
<a href="http://www.spatialys.com" target="_blank">http://www.spatialys.com</a>
My software is free, but my time generally not.</pre>
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