you wrote, “I’ve argued that we should be moving the boundary of what we do outwards so that we can at least provide more of what was provided by the layer of service providers. Not all of the market for geo data and services outside of the US tech bubble is going to enthusiastically embrace that their choice of suppliers has been reduced to a duopoly. “

We should do this. We should not just let the market forces play out. It’s that simple. It is eminently doable. We could change our passive ways. We should change them. I might say we owe it to the project and to the world.

you wrote, “I’ve argued that we should be moving the boundary of what we do outwards so that we can at least provide more of what was provided by the layer of service providers. Not all of the market for geo data and services outside of the US tech bubble is going to enthusiastically embrace that their choice of suppliers has been reduced to a duopoly. “

We should do this. We should not just let the market forces play out. It’s that simple. It is eminently doable. We could change our passive ways. We should change them. I might say we owe it to the project and to the world.

you wrote, “They have enough managers. They know whom to call. We don’t. There’s zero chance of us finding someone like Tyler. There’s no money for a first year CEO salary either. As I wrote above, it’s a stalemate and can only be resolved from the outside. That “outside” could be Overture — thus fixing several misunderstandings at once.”

To which I want to say. I do know who to call. I have very similar skills to Tyler. I know how to manage. I worked on every aspect of OSM fundraising this year, indeed can be credited as part of any success. I watched the birth of Overture from inside TomTom and know the players. I know others with similar skills. We are here. As far as I can tell, we are stalemated only by the unwillingness to take bold action and by a very few people committed to an outdated approach.

Hi, again,

My understanding is that the 10,000,000 registered users is over the entire life of the project, not a “current number of users,” so it’s not relevant to this particular data set as we only studied the communications between January 2022 and May 2023.

Keep in mind that a “user” in the context of this study is “someone who posts.” Our survey (and general data on how people communicate online) tells us that many, many more people read who don’t post. We can’t measure ‘engagement’ like that on the old mailing lists, but we could measure it on the Discourse forum.

It sounds about right that we have probably 2000 active users who post in the forums and old mailing lists, but keep in mind, we didn’t study Telegram and Discord, which have many hundreds of users and tens, if not hundreds of thousands of messages, as well. These two channels are used more often in Africa, SEA, South Asia, and Oceania

It also doesn’t measure US Slack, which has 5000 users, I believe.

There is so much more to study - this is a massive data set with all kinds of information in it, I am really hoping to get a grant or other means of studying it with a bigger team and more powerful computational tools.

Hello,

I doublechecked this with Keara Dennehy, our data expert, and this is what she said:

“These counts are referring to the number of unique users within that platform. Users will be counted twice across platforms if they use both (e.g. if you added the 3039 + 1698, you would no longer have a distinct list). Users are only counted once within the platforms, no matter how many times they post. So, to answer this commenter’s question at the bottom, this would leave 3038 and 1697.”