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# System prepended metadata

title: "\U0001F44B Welcome to the forum, get involved in the next steps here!"

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*:warning: This is a draft post to be published once the Discourse forum is ready, please add your feedback about the post wording/structure, if you have feedback about the questions listed, please keep them for when the post is live, thanks!*

**✅ Strings/wording is now frozen to have time to localize to other languages, thanks everyone for your feedback**

# 👋 Welcome to the forum, get involved in the next steps here!

Hello everyone,

Welcome to the OpenStreetMap Community forums, my name is Rubén and I'm helping facilitate the community discussion around this new tool and its future.

**🗣 This is an important moment for the future of OpenStreetMap communities conversations and you can  be part of it getting involved in this topic! 😊**

But first, a bit of context.

## What is this place and why does it exist?

OSMF has historically maintained a set of communications channels and tools to support open mapping communities and contributors around the world.

These channels haven’t evolved much in the past 10 years, and they are a combination of synchronous and asynchronous:

- Mailing lists (email) - IRC (chat) - Mumble (voice chat) - BigBlueButton (video)
- Web forum (discussions) - OSM Help (support) - Diaries (comments)
- OSM Blogs (Planet) (comments) - OSM Wiki (comments/doc)

During the past years, local communities have also created their own channels using other tools and services not controlled by the OSMF: Slack, Telegram, Whatsapp, Discord, Reddit, Discourse, Fediverse/Mastodon…

Around mid-2020 the Operations WG expressed their interest into modernizing OSM forums and OSM Help (Q&A site) ([issue](https://github.com/openstreetmap/operations/issues/377), [meeting notes](https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Operations/Minutes/2020-08-26#Merge_forums.2C_OSQA.2C_MLs_to_discourse.3F)) and in early-2021 decided using the [Discourse](https://www.discourse.org/) as an open source (and self-hosted) replacement for those two.

*([see how other communities are using Discourse](https://www.discourse.org/customers))*

Since then, this Discourse instance has been set up (thanks to Grant Slater), including OSM ([oauth2](https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/pull/3177)) login support (thanks Tom and the rest of the Ops WG), as well as plugins to support topic resolution and canned replies to be able to host Q&A topics. 

*🙏 We would like to also appreciate everyone who has been active providing feedback during the early technical testing phase: mmd, Tobias, Guillaume, Amanda, Josh, Maggie, pnorman, ian, westnordost, Arnalie, Pete... and many others. Thanks so much!*

## What's next? Let's talk!

There are still a lot of open questions about the future of this platform, and with this topic we open the co-design phase with everyone who wants to be involved.

We intend to keep using this forum to bring transparency and collaboration to its development.

These are some of the questions we want to discuss here, what do you think? 

**↩️ Reply and let us know!**

1. Which governance/accountability model do we want for this tool? Who and how should decisions being made? [Link to a separate topic with concrete suggestions]
2. Which are the initial categories we want to enable? Which communities would they support? [Link to a separate topic with concrete suggestions]
3. What's the right use of categories and tags to serve our needs?
4. How will we handle conversations on other languages than English? And location-based conversations?
5. How do we ensure proper moderation? Who should have access (and how) to global and per-category moderation?
6. Are there other open question you want to discuss?

Please reply to this message with your ideas, for clarity we will move/split into separate topics the most popular ones.

**After March 21st the group of people who has been supporting this effort will consolidate all the feedback and we'll present back to the community on this forum for further engagement. Follow this topic to get updates.**

😊 Thanks for your time and interest in helping shape the future of OSM conversations!

*PS: Still not familiar with Discourse? Send a message to @discobot to get some tips and tricks.*

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**1. Which governance/accountability model do we want for this tool? Who and how should decisions being made?**

The current proposal is to form a small team to own decision making and day-to-day operations of the tool.

Initially this group is formed by a few individuals who have been involved in the initial setup and implementation of the project and expressed their commitment to support during this first phase:
- Tobias Knerr (OSMF Board)
- Grant Slater (OSM Ops team)
- Rubén Martín (HOT Community Team)

This group will support an open a conversation with OSM communities to define how more diverse people can be part of this team and the requirements in terms of representation, commitment, accountability and leadership rotation.

**Please use this topic to discuss about it and share your thoughts in how this team should operate.**

We will be using this very same discourse instance to talk about how the work evolved and decisions are being made.

Thanks!

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**2. Which are the initial categories we want to enable? Which communities would they support?**

Since the original goal for this tool to be deployed is to modernize certain existing OSM tools, we believe that at least we need to kick-start with 3 top-level categories:

- **Help and support**: To be used for gradually migrate OSM Help site.
- **Communities**: To host country-level categories and allow their migration from the old OSM forums.
- **Site feedback**: This category to discuss and talk in an open and transparent way about OSM Community discourse, it's governance, issues and improvements. 

Additionally we would like this instance to be used for other functional OSM groups, including working groups and event-related groups, such as global and local SoTM or Humanitarian Open Mapping discussions for example.

Request for new categories will be organized from this very same category and we will prioritize existing active community groups that want to migrate from old OSM tools. Note that we don't have the capability to import content/users from other tools and we suggest old tools to archive their old content as an static HTML site and start fresh over here.

**Are there other categories you consider should be prioritized for this initial phase? Why?**