[Incubator] The need for mantra

[Jeroen Ticheler]

Hi Regina,
While it is useful for people to know that they do not need an OSGeo ID for
everything, I think our idea was that it is a nice thing to have for people
as the 1 thing that links them to OSGeo (just an account). People say they
wish to volunteer, but when trying to get an ID, they fail and leave. You
would need an ID if you wanted to work on a WIKI page, other stuff that is
community work. And I feel we should avoid that hurdle to be high or even
existing. We definitely want to avoid bots, but regular people?
Or am I misunderstanding your idea of preventing people creating an account
if they just wanted to even download QGIS and later happen to be involved?
Cheers,
Jeroen


On Wed, 14 Jan 2026 at 19:34, Regina Obe via Incubator <
incubator at lists.osgeo.org> wrote:

> As discussed in this email and in the incubation committee meeting today.
> The need for mantra is burdensome.  It is burdensome for users asking for
> one and also for those who have to address them and 80% of the time there
> is
> no point to the ask.
>
> Main issues are:
>
> 1) People ask for an osgeo id simply to introduce themselves to the
> community and their interests and for some reason think they need an osgeo
> id to do so.
> 2) People ask for mantras cause they want to download QGIS software and
> think they need one.
>
>
> Then there are some people that really need OSGeo ids cause they need to
> publish a QGIS plugin.
>
>
> Jody thought maybe using discourse in some way to field these might help.
>
> I created a Introduction category with a template to just test this idea
> out.
>
> https://discourse.osgeo.org/c/introductions
>
>
> If you notice if you create a new topic in this category, it will prefill
> with a template.
>
> Anyone else that asks me to give them a mantra without sufficient
> information to do so, I'm going to force them to fill this out to prove
> their need and if they do, I'll just private message them on discourse with
> the mantra.
>
> This is of course an experiment, but I figure is frictionless way for
> people
> to introduce themselves to us and if it doesn't work for mantra, at the
> very
> least, it will be easier to filter out from those folk who use the
> "General"
> category to introduce themselves.  I'm going to move all the intro messages
> out of general and into this category.
>
> Discourse Admins - please fill free to edit the category template - which
> is
> located here -
> https://discourse.osgeo.org/c/introductions/edit/topic-template
>
> Thanks,
> Regina
>
>
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