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

[Javier Jimenez Shaw]

Hi

Maybe my experience as "recent" newcomer helps a bit.
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.
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, ...)
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.
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?
 Even before becoming a member I had "donated" a repo to osgeo in github
without having the account in osgeo.org.
Later I used my account only to access discourse, configure it properly for
the mail notifications, and that's all.

In summary: you can be active and not use the account. For me it is mailing
list, github, (and mastodon to have some fun).

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)

(now reading my story, maybe I am not that recent newcomer).

Cheers,

On Sat, 28 Sept 2024 at 13:22, Even Rouault <even.rouault at spatialys.com>
wrote:

> 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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