OpenStreetMap
I'm a keen fiddler with the OSM wiki. It's almost become my "role" within the project. Certainly it's the area where I've made myself most useful. Over time this has given me a bit of a birds-eye view of project goings-on. But it's a slightly skewed view because actually, active though it is, the wiki is not the primary communication channel of OSM. That would be the dreaded mailing list (dev and talk)
I don't follow the mailing list at all. Gave up trying. It's too high traffic. If I want high traffic, I look at Recent Changes. I should probably call in on nabble every now and then, just to look for interesting subjects. But I kind of decided that however you slice it, the mailing list will be too much of drain on my time. But this means that I (and people like me) end up missing out on any of the juicy announcements, which don't surface so quickly via other channels.
Which is why OSM community really badly needs a mailing list weekly digest again! I have just put forward this suggestion via a wiki edit (of course!). I suppose posting to the mailing list would be more sensible... but I'm not on the mailing list :-)
Discussion
Comment from POHB on 11 September 2008 at 08:56
I wasn't really aware that there was a mailing list until you mentioned it. Having looked at "nabble" I can see that there's way more stuff there than I'd want to see, but a weekly digest would be good. Even better would be an intelligently written weekly/monthly round-up of what's been going on - a newsletter if you like. Any volunteers? Or does such a thing exist already?
While I'm about it, is there a way to filter a Recent Changes search on the wiki to only show English pages?
Comment from daveemtb on 11 September 2008 at 10:00
I think this would be a considerable time commitment, I'm not sure anyone would want to do it, but I can see it would be useful.
Comment from Harry Wood on 11 September 2008 at 13:20
Show only English pages? No but we might have this soon via the wiki namespaces mechanism. See Talk:Wiki#multilingual ability. Note that german language pages are mostly talking about german places. Perhaps the real problem is not the language, but the wiki pages about places all over the world which don't really interest you. Personally I make very extensive use of my "watchlist". I basically watch every page of the wiki apart from the pages about places!
It would take time write the words of a mailing list weekly digest, but the time spent reading all the emails is probably the big thing... and that's time that a lot of people do actually spend anyway. Just need one of those people to do the writing bit (Doesn't have to be the same person every week)