Community dynamics - messaging to users of the site

[simonpoole]

This is essentially pro memoria.

The original proposal by Mapbox for the Knight Foundation funded work in 2012 contained a concept for a news section/modal/... that is a way to present current information to all kind of visitors of the website. More than 13 years later on this is still missing and we rely on users somehow discovering the wiki and then hopefully finding something that is not completely outdated.

At the time, while it wasn't communicated, it is fair to assume that money and time simple ran out and the feature was dropped, but just as back then I believe this would still be important functionality to have and would make messing around with ad hoc solutions for example for banners etc unnecessary and reach a far wider audience than the wiki.

[1ec5]

Thank you for this important context. I was unaware of the intention to develop a news section, but it makes sense. Do you recall if there was any thinking about the content or source of this section? Was it primarily what we use banners for, or closer to what’s featured on the wiki’s main page?

(We’ve gotten feedback that even finding the wiki can be difficult. This leads to the periodic discussion about reforming the top-level site navigation: openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website#3041 (comment) openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website#6006 openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website#6517 (comment).)

[simonpoole]

I'll need to go digging a bit to see if I still have any of the original documentation. But IMHO anything from announcing planned outages, over interesting stories up to simply linking to weekly OSM (and osm cal) would be fair game.

[simonpoole]

Couldn't find anything outside of some e-mail communication around the announcement, but this does go back to nearly pre-mapbox time. Eric essentially kickstarted mapbox with the $575k from the Knight Foundation and every thing was a bit knifes and daggers.