Hi,
couple mixed remarks/pointers on this:
On 10/16/2012 12:40 AM, Alex Barth wrote:
- Making the rails port easier to set up brings more contributors,
installing got a lot easier,
Matt had at one time produced a virtual machine image that had
"everything" on it to get started with the rails port; don't know the
current status of that but definitely useful for someone who wants to
get started with it.
- How could the Mapnik style be more open to improvements? We
definitely need to get it on GitHub.
I don't think the version control system used makes a difference - I
doubt the 400+ issues filed against the current style would be solved
quicker with git. The problem is not that this uses SVN, the problem is
that (a) many of the issues are actually hard to solve, at least if the
resulting style still needs to run fast, and (b) many of the issues
concern someone's "pet feature", stuff that the cartographer would
prefer to leave out but the mapper would like to see. Some of these
actually have patches but they never got applied. Even if moved to git,
we will need a strong maintainer who does not shy away from rejecting
pull requests that they don't like.
- Should we have multiple canonical styles?
I think the next big issue (that was mentioned somewhere on the wish
list already) is that we want to support maps in 200 languages. For
style variety, I think the current approach is fine (where interested
third parties create and host tiles and let us display them in return
for attribution).
- Should SVG export be replaced with something else, or improved in
Mapnik enough to be worthwhile?
Definitely a question that I am often asked - keep in mind that there
are two kinds of SVG, that which conforms to the standard and that which
is readable by Adobe Illustrator, and most people actually need the
second. I always tell people to use Maperitive for SVG export but it's
not open source and only works on limited areas.
- Improving the social experience on OSM.org is not about integrating
with social platforms like Facebook, but about making it easier for
mappers to connect. - There is a gap between the broad, public
mailing lists that many are not subscribed to and private messages,
leading for instance to situations where individuals can be flooded
with dozens of personal messages in the case of disputed changesets.
Yes. That has been discussed for quite a while. Personally I think that
a method of publicly commenting, or up/downvoting changesets, would be
great.
In Wikipedia, all user-to-user messages are automatically public (unless
both parties agree to take it to email). Maybe food for thought - do we
need private messages at all? There seem to be quite a number of bullies
in OSM who send self-important messages to lesser experienced mappers
explaining "their" rules... that could be stopped if all messages were
public.
How could community events be highlighted on osm.org? On
your user profile?
There has been talk about building a feature jokingly called the "please
spam me" feature where upon signup people agree to receive email
notifications about events in their area of interest, and then someone
planning an event can simply send a message to "all interested in this
area". Of course if the platform moves away from email-style messages
and towards "wall"-style messages that could be used too.
A sandbox for beginners sounds like a good idea
at first, but there's a real danger of loosing people to it who could
be mapping the real world instead.
When newbies ask for a sandbox it is often out of a desire to "see how
it looks like on the map" if they add a feature with certain tags. This
is dangerous and could lead to "mapping for the renderer" which we
should discourage.
Bye
Frederik
--
Frederik Ramm ## eMail frede...@remote.org ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33"
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