[OSGeo-Discuss] Mailing lists to discourse migration

[Sandro Santilli]

On Fri, Dec 29, 2023 at 09:52:35AM +1100, Bruce Bannerman via Discuss wrote:
>    Apart from these few emails telling me that a move to something called
>    Discourse is happening, I have not seen any discussion on our lists
>    explaining the pros and cons of such a move. 
>    I find this lack of community engagement on this issue to be troubling.
>    This does not seem to be a very open source community way of making such a
>    significant move.

I feel the same and ask every OSGeo member with responsibility over
infrastructure to use this mailing list more as this is the "place"
with the most foundation members.

The introduction of so many new/different communication channels
resulted in this fragmentation leaving people with this feeling
of being excluded, which is to be avoided.

>    Personally, what we have now has been working nicely for me for close on
>    20 years.

Same for me. This is something new generations probably consider like
a reason to change (20 years, you oldies!) but I really think email is
still the most open and available and configuratble communication channel
for everyone. I'm 100% sure blind people can read and write email just
fine, and I know first person that I can read and write email even from a
place where internet connection quality is poor, and from machines
which are not very powerful, and I think this is very important if we
want to be inclusive.

>    The lists have been very quiet for quite a while now, but that is a
>    community engagement issue. It is not something that technology will
>    magically fix.

This is only partially true: I've seen a lot of people who are
being very partecipative BUT do not interact on the mailing lists,
even people having responsibilty on the OSGeo infrastructure have been
expressing a form of dislike for mailing lists, for reasons we cannot
pretend not to see.

I for one only very recently finally got back to manage my own email
and I'm seeing again the problems associated with doing so. This does
not mean the same problems do not exist with other systems, but we
should try to understand the needs of our user base and try to help
with providing solutions.

The above said: I'm also disappointed by not seeing partecipation in
the effort which is required to setup a new service (Discourse) from
the very people who loudly asked for it. Let's all please remember
that infrastructures need to be maintained so please don't ask what
OSGeo can do for you ("I want service X") but rather ask what you can
do for OSGeo ("I want to help maintaining service X").

Thank you for reading so far (short messages are also a kind of
technology some prefer to avoid long messages like mine ;)

--strk;