Thanks to all the potential moderators for confirming their availability. That was impressively quick!
We’ll wait at least 5 days to make sure everyone has had time to share their opinions and discuss this category request. After that discussion, we’ll set up a simple poll that will also run for 5 days. This will formally demonstrate community support for this new category and moderator team. Once the poll succeeds, we are going to create the category (with the imported content from the old forum).
That part of the template is probably odd for communities which did already exist on the old forum. But it’s meant to ask about your local community’s existing discussion platforms outside this forum.
In your particular case, I’m aware the Swiss community is already using a mailing list hosted by SOSM, an OSMF local chapter. Am I right to assume there is no “transition plan” as such and the channels will simply coexist, with people using whichever they prefer? If that mailing list is currently used for any official SOSM updates, will that content be cross-posted to the new subforum?
I very much welcome this enquiry and look forward to receiving many posts from Switzerland. Should there be a need for a fourth moderator, whether due to habi’s travelling time or not, I am happy to be available with a regular view of Eastern Switzerland but also Liechtenstein.
No, for historical reasons, openstreetmap.ch and the mailing list talk-ch@openstreetmap.ch are not hosted by SOSM, but by a (former(?)) community member not affiliated with SOSM. (Both the domain and the mailing list predate SOSM.)
At least for now, yes. As Discourse categories (AFAIK other than the previous incarnation of the OSM forum) can be interacted with by e-mail (and as one can subscribe to e-mail message delivery) and also because the current traditional mailing list is not hosted by SOSM, the Swiss community might at some later point consider to move future asynchronous communication fully to the forum and thus have the category replace the mailing list, but not without prior discussion on both, the mailing list and the forum.
While SOSM does use that mailing list for some communication, I’m unsure whether any of that constitutes “official SOSM updates”. Some formally mandated announcements of SOSM, like the invitation to its own annual general assembly, must be sent to SOSM members, for which SOSM has a separate channel, as not all members are subscribed to talk-ch and as not all talk-ch subscribers are SOSM members.
Please note that neither the Switzerland section of the previous OpenStreetMap forum nor the mailing list talk-ch are or were operated by SOSM, nor are or were they official communication channels for SOSM members. Rather, they were or are there for the whole Swiss OSM community, including (but by far not limited to) SOSM and its members. The same is our goal with this forum subcategory. Towards that purpose, SOSM will post announcements of general interest also here.
By the way, another goal is for this forum subcategory (like Switzerland itself, as well as existing OSM communication channels for Switzerland such as the mailing list talk-ch and the IRC channel / Matrix room #osm-ch) to be multilingual:
As long as it’s on-topic, users should feel free to post in any of the four official languages of Switzerland, or in English.
personal opinion
Kaj laŭ mi, ni permesu ankaŭ aliajn lingvojn. Per komputilaj tradukiloj ni ja sufiĉe facile kapablus pritaksi eĉ afiŝojn en lingvoj, kiujn ni mem (sen tia ilo) ne komprenus, do povus tamen prizorgi la foruman kategorion.
Sed pri tio eble indos pli diskuti antaŭ ol decidi.
Replies may even be in different languages than a thread’s original post.
Thanks to everyone who has provided input on this category request so far!
I’m now starting a poll to validate the creation of a “Switzerland” category with @Geonick, @habi and @das-g as the initial moderation team. The list will be validated if it gets at least 80% of yes votes. Note that votes (who voted what) are public to help identify any abuses.
Do you approve @Geonick, @habi and @das-g to be category moderators for the “Switzerland” category?
The Switzerland category has now been set up (with the content imported from the old forum already in place). I’ve also added the approved moderators to the @mods-switzerland group.
If you mean this …
it’s just the colors associated with the Communities and Switzerland categories, respectively. We currently don’t have the ability to put icons there – that possibility is being discussed in the “Icons for categories” thread.
Yes, the 
No, for historical reasons, openstreetmap.ch and the mailing list talk-ch@openstreetmap.ch are not hosted by SOSM, but by a (former(?)) community member not affiliated with SOSM. (Both the domain and the mailing list predate SOSM.)
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