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

Committees SAC mailing list
1

Hi,

at the risk of being perceived as a trouble maker, is there really really no alternative to that ... odd... (I highly edited my original wording) OSGeo initiation custom?

I mean: if you add together all the hours volunteers are spending repeating again and again the same question ("please share a link to a public page", et blabla et blabla), maybe a viable technical alternative could have been found instead.

Or do we think that we are really doing "community bonding" by requiring OSGeo incumbents to have to succeed in that step?

What are we trying to protect exactly? Spam to Trac wiki ? Well, easy, let's kill Trac wiki. Hint: I just did it to GDAL. Problem solved here.

Even

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

2

A popular alternative, and one available as a default in the discourse software we started using, is to trust email addresses from specific domains.
A university or employer email address would serve the same purpose: do we have someone we can contact about your behaviour if needful?

We could start by trusting domain names from osgeo partners (for example).

Such a thing would not help folks using hotmail or gmail, but it would be something.

3

I agree we should come up with a better technical way of dealing with this.

I recall some had come up, but I can’t remember what they are.

There is the usual captcha but those have a habit of not working well.

Even with real humans I’ve run into some who were clearly just SEO folks wanting to post ads on our sites.

There also seem to be quite a few people wanting accounts cause they confuse us with some other org or think they need an account to use QGIS software.

I haven’t figured out if it’s just some plugins asking for some sort of registration or what.

Note sure how to make it clear to these folks they don’t need one.

Trac is the least of our concerns in protecting.

The following things require OSGeo LDAP account and I’d want to be careful about

QGIS plugin registration

Being able to set up a profile on osgeo.org

Being able to setup or edit a page on wiki.osgeo.org

Yes being able to post trac tickets

Being able to put files on nextcloud.osgeo.org

Translating using Weblate.osgeo.org

Logging into OSGeo servers – though granted that requires you being in a special group as well.

Adding videos to video.osgeo.org

Being able to start a meeting on meet.osgeo.org

Regarding Jody’s comment I suppose we can setup at least a routine to trust all .edu and .gov addresses, cause those I just give them the mantra anyway without asking.

We could also just code discobot in discourse I think so that if a person has reached a certain level in discourse they will be granted the mantra if they ask or we preemptively give them the mantra at a certain level.

From: Jody Garnett jody.garnett@gmail.com
Sent: Thursday, September 26, 2024 7:50 PM
To: Even Rouault even.rouault@spatialys.com
Cc: System Administration Committee Discussion/OSGeo sac@lists.osgeo.org
Subject: Re: Mantra, mon joli mantra, dis moi qui est la plus belle ?

A popular alternative, and one available as a default in the discourse software we started using, is to trust email addresses from specific domains.

A university or employer email address would serve the same purpose: do we have someone we can contact about your behaviour if needful?

We could start by trusting domain names from osgeo partners (for example).

Such a thing would not help folks using hotmail or gmail, but it would be something.

Jody Garnett

On Sep 26, 2024 at 3:17:27 PM, Even Rouault <even.rouault@spatialys.com> wrote:

Hi,

at the risk of being perceived as a trouble maker, is there really
really no alternative to that … odd… (I highly edited my original
wording) OSGeo initiation custom?

I mean: if you add together all the hours volunteers are spending
repeating again and again the same question (“please share a link to a
public page”, et blabla et blabla), maybe a viable technical alternative
could have been found instead.

Or do we think that we are really doing “community bonding” by requiring
OSGeo incumbents to have to succeed in that step?

What are we trying to protect exactly? Spam to Trac wiki ? Well, easy,
let’s kill Trac wiki. Hint: I just did it to GDAL. Problem solved here.

Even

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

4

"Regina Obe" <lr@pcorp.us> writes:

Regarding Jody’s comment I suppose we can setup at least a routine to
trust all .edu and .gov addresses, cause those I just give them the
mantra anyway without asking.

I see your point but this is us centric.

There are two issues with CAPTCHAs. One is that they are annoying and
the more serious one is that google's has unacceptable properties and
terms but people seem to use it anyway. I think osgeo should by policy
not load any tracking resources.

5

> Regarding Jody’s comment I suppose we can setup at least a routine to
> trust all .edu and .gov addresses, cause those I just give them the
> mantra anyway without asking.

I see your point but this is us centric.

That was just examples. But I think a lot of none-us have some flavor of gov, gouv, and edu in their domains that we can say if a domain ends with whatever
that it comes from a uni or gov. There is probably a set for each country we can trust.

6

I think we could start by allowing those from partner organizations…

Like if a GeoForAll lab is setup we are establishing a trust relationship with them as a group.

That is not a us centric approach, but only helps a limited number of people, but they are a limited number of people that made a decision to work with us.

7

@scottmchale is doing a survey on website usability, but the primary feedback is how difficult and confusing this topic is …

In part because it is presented in both technical (LDAP and services) and social (Join OSGeo) terms.

Resulting in tension:

  • The mantra seems to align more with the “join osgeo” goals, and wants to be easy and welcoming.

  • And the technical suggestions (passkey / two-factor / captcha / OAuth2 trust) would align more with the access to services; and wants to be secure at the expense of usability.

8

> Yes being able to post trac tickets
That's mostly PostGIS, right? I checked a couple of projects from https://trac.osgeo.org/, FDO is probably abandoned (and is causing some trouble with the database when the bots are hitting it), MapGuide's most recent tickets are from 18 months ago, GRASS uses GitHub anyway.

Yes mostly PostGIS and OSGeo trac. I did forget though that GRASS uses OSGeo LDAP for https://grasswiki.osgeo.org .

Adding videos to video.osgeo.org
Being able to start a meeting on meet.osgeo.org

Somehow I doubt that people will want to register just to upload something to Nextcloud or PeerTube. It's usually the other way around, it's those who've been with OSGeo for years that post there.

I agree on that, it would be mostly long standing users and I definitely wouldn't care to waste space on users we don't fully trust.

Regarding CAPTCHA's, Cloudflare's Turnstile works quite well, and requires no-interaction. I think reCAPTCHA also has a similar mode these days, but I'm not sure.
Of course, a lot of people have something against Cloudflare, but 1. they're not into the ad and tracking business, 2. I've seen very wild (surprising) accusations, but those were never substantiated.

Yah that's the one you suggested Cloudflare's Turnstile. I don't know enough about it to have pressing concerns with it and most of cloudflare accusations do seem like FUD to me.
The fact is we are already using cloudflare for osgeo.org DNS so I'm not sure it adds any more issue than what ever concerns we already have.

I don't think whitelisting specific TLDs will help that much. About half of the requests come from students and people who teach at universities.
And a lot of requests seem misguided, with people who think they need an account for random QGIS plugins.

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.

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 not even sure it's a good thing to have students publish their homework, as, even assuming their plugins are great, they're unlikely to be maintained in the future.

That is a decision I think QGIS plugin admins should make. If they require more vetting or would like us to reject students, then they should say so.

9 
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 :slight_smile: … ? 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…

10

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@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](http://lists.osgeo.org) and [discourse.osgeo.org](http://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 :slight_smile: … ? 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](http://www.spatialys.com)
My software is free, but my time generally not.
11

We need to square the ease of use, with the impression that we are not friendly and do not want new people.

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.

Try and sign up 500 to keep 1. And the impression you make during sign up controls if you keep 3.

12

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 :blush:. 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.

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.

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

We need to square the ease of use, with the impression that we are not friendly and do not want new people.

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.

Try and sign up 500 to keep 1. And the impression you make during sign up controls if you keep 3.

Jody Garnett

13

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 :blush:. 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.

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.

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

We need to square the ease of use, with the impression that we are not friendly and do not want new people.

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.

Try and sign up 500 to keep 1. And the impression you make during sign up controls if you keep 3.

- -

Jody Garnett

--
Angelos Tzotsos, PhD
President, Board of Directors
Open Source Geospatial Foundation
https://www.osgeo.org/member/angelos-tzotsos/

14

Just going to reply to this one:

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.

What an amazing thing to do in a course! Finally teach open source practice, rather than just use :slight_smile:

The thrill and empowerment people get when actually manage to thank them in release announcement ( even just for testing). Time and time again I find people at a foss4g who really benefited, or their employer could see the value of the work they did, etc…

Rant mode on :slight_smile:

I am so tired of osgeo board making 1 sided memorandum of understandings with professional bodies and academic institutions. Sure you could promote foss4g software; validate it as a legit way to GIS - not. Don’t show me the money show me your people! Do your people even have permission to contribute to open source? Really? A clear contribution policy or do they have to ask on a case by case basis etc…

Rant mode off

Download is an arrow, foss4g has to be a circle.

Jody

15

Yeah, I think the same.

Btw, I have made some plots out of mbox files but they are too depressing…

Markus

Angelos Tzotsos <gcpp.kalxas@gmail.com> schrieb am Mo., 30. Sep. 2024, 00:31:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 :blush:. 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.

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.

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

We need to square the ease of use, with the impression that we are not friendly and do not want new people.

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.

Try and sign up 500 to keep 1. And the impression you make during sign up controls if you keep 3.

Jody Garnett

–
Angelos Tzotsos, PhD
President, Board of Directors
Open Source Geospatial Foundation
https://www.osgeo.org/member/angelos-tzotsos/

16

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.

Regina with that in mind … please review revised text: https://discourse.osgeo.org/t/welcome-to-osgeo/5

The existing text I am proposing to replace assumed a lot of knowledge and is not suitable for new visitors.

17

From: Jody Garnett jody.garnett@gmail.com
Sent: Wednesday, October 2, 2024 4:10 PM
To: Regina Obe lr@pcorp.us
Cc: System Administration Committee Discussion/OSGeo sac@lists.osgeo.org; Sandro Santilli strk@kbt.io; Laurențiu Nicola lnicola@dend.ro; Even Rouault even.rouault@spatialys.com
Subject: Re: Mantra, mon joli mantra, dis moi qui est la plus belle ?

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.

Regina with that in mind … please review revised text: https://discourse.osgeo.org/t/welcome-to-osgeo/5

The existing text I am proposing to replace assumed a lot of knowledge and is not suitable for new visitors.

[Regina Obe]

Looks good to me. I like the bullet points up top so people can decide what bucket they fit in.

I think maybe the only thing I would add , is to anchor the bullet points to the various sections. I recall that is possible in markdown, though admittedly I can’t remember how to do it offhand.