Mantra, mon joli mantra, dis moi qui est la plus belle ?

[Even Rouault]

> 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.
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)
>
> I really would like them to join mailing lists lists.osgeo.org and discourse.osgeo.org 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.

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 
https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/qgis-developer/, "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...

-- 
http://www.spatialys.com
My software is free, but my time generally not.
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