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

[Angelos Tzotsos]

This thread is exactly what we are missing from discuss these days.


On 9/29/24 02:02, Regina Obe wrote:
> To Even’s point, I don’t think we should have “Create an LDAP account” front and center. Mailing Lists and Discourse should be front and center.
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> The reality is that for most OSGeo services e.g. downloading software or asking a question people don’t need an LDAP account, and they shouldn’t be asking for one if they are merely passing by.
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> And while it’s nice that all these University students are creating QGIS plugins, to Laurențiu point, I’m not sure they should be encourage to add it to the QGIS registry as most likely those plugins will be abandoned.
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> As to discourse, the reason I put this up is my feeling is with the success of open source, people’s patience is stretched more thinly across many more projects.  So we do suffer for being more mature projects cause there are much fewer low hanging fruit to pick on.
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> Chances are if you are a passer by you only care about YOUR problem.  Mailing lists seem to require way too much engagement for a passing crowd.
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> With discourse, people can simply watch a single topic or many topics they are interested in and YES we do allow them to log in with their github accounts (which I know many people disagree with), but I intentionally enabled cause I see this as a gate of inspection that should be very frictionless for the large github crowd who whine about having to create yet another account.  I also personally dislike mailing lists cause I get bombarded with client requests etc on my mail so my mail is mostly focused on client requests and I just want my interaction with osgeo to be completely separate.  Something I can login look at when I have some breathing time or show as an alert on my phone in my discourse app and that I can easily dismiss new stuff quickly by scanning or unwatch if a discussion is of little interest to me.
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> But anyway I have always preferred latching on to people once they join mailing lists, discourse, or they submit a couple of patches or bug tickets.  And hell if they went thru that whole grueling getting a mantra to submit a ticket, they are no ordinary user 😊. All those I can sense their strengths, their interests, and if they are worth my extra time to target or simply just passing by not ready for any kind of commitment.
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> SIDE NOTE:  I have been surprised the number of people submitting QGIS questions in the discourse General channel.  Users sometimes submit Geoserver questions in General as well, which is nice I can just move to Geoserver/users category and tell them to post there in future.  I don’t know if maybe people find the QGIS mailing lists too much trouble to post to  or there is something especially attractive about the Discourse / General category. Like “I have no clue where to go, let me post here”, which is fine I since discourse makes it easy to move those to the appropriate category if there is one.
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> Subject: Re: Mantra, mon joli mantra, dis moi qui est la plus belle ?
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> We need to square the ease of use, with the impression that we are not friendly and do not want new people.
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> Using the same facilities you want to be protective of (LDAP) to play the same role as “how to join welcome” - is resulting in conflicting goals.
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> Try and sign up 500 to keep 1. And the impression you make during sign up controls if you keep 3.
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> - -
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> Jody Garnett
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-- 
Angelos Tzotsos, PhD
President, Board of Directors
Open Source Geospatial Foundation
https://www.osgeo.org/member/angelos-tzotsos/