I made a thread yesterday about OSE Cars, and today I found it had been transferred to 'Transportation.' This might seem sensible at a glance, but I believe that this action represents a very destructive policy.

This site, the only place for OSE discussion, and the forum linked to from the wiki, gets a trickle of activity far less than the critical mass of participation necessary to sustain itself. Not having a highly active community cannot help OSE in anyway, it can only be a bad thing to be remedied. This policy endlessly subdivides topics down to complete obscurity, where interest and participation is so dilute as to have zero participation. It's hard enough to discuss things to begin with, and there is no flood of topics in the 'general' board that makes the virtual real estate there highly valuable, making some subdivision necessary. This destructive policy is actively contributing to dissuading participation by everyday people which is in no way beneficial.

If this is about organization, then might I suggest assigning tags, so that subdivisions of interest can be viewed alone, but aren't required to be completely swept to a corner of the forum with even less traffic than there presently is. If this is about malevolently throwing out threads and people you don't like, then please direct me to a forum where I can go and actually talk with people who are interested in the OSE project. I don't believe that's the case, though, so for now I'm assuming this is merely an unintentionally self-destructive setup.

Right now, these are the endless subdivisions of activity:

1. General Discussion
2. Introductions
3. GVCS Development
4. GVCS Replication
5. Similar Projects
6. In the News
7. Education
8. Food
9. Energy
10. Health
11. Sustainable Agriculture
12. Transportation
13. Household
14. Web Infrastructure
15. Shared Personal Notes
16. New Communities
17. Other Languages (Multiple Sections)
18. Team Logs
19. Open Source Car
20. & Documentation / Instructionals

Wow! That's a lot of subtopics! And again, to have them designated as subtopics but visible within a larger master topic would be great. But really there's only two topics: discussion and development. They should be kept separate for obvious reasons, but that's the only place where I would suggest a division of activity. Beyond that everything should be winnowed down by the user's preferences. Toggled tags automatically show or hide topics with that tag, so that developers can view just what they're interested in, or all development related things at once. This is already basically in place with the ability to view all topics in one form, it just needs to be refined.

Moving topics to graveyards to die, though, is not a good policy. Thanks for listening.