Josm Docu isn't really important. most functions are self explaining. What we really need is to understand what Josm does with the data and how this working with the API and the whole OSM database. Conflict resolution or history functionality are such topics where good docu or tutorials can help.
But as said before this is NOT a task for the developers. It's not even a Josm problem. My problem in the last months was that the development was too fast to even catch up with the idea how things work. With a couple of bugs impossible. The only solution was to create trac tickets and Karl fixed them all. thanks for that. Still have some conflict problems from time to time. Not sure if this is a Josm problem or more a sync problem when server connections are interrupted and josm doesn't receive the response from the server. anyway, thanks for the great work. It's a great tool today and will be better in future. On Sun, Oct 4, 2009 at 9:46 AM, Dirk Stöcker <openstreet...@dstoecker.de>wrote: > On Sun, 4 Oct 2009, Karl Guggisberg wrote: > > >> No. All my experience shows that this is untrue. People either help or > >> they don't help. > > > > This goes along with my experience but the interesting point is how to > find > > those who want to help. What do you have to do to attract people who > would > > like to improve JOSMs documentation? I think today they don't even know > that > > JOSM is looking for help. If we want documentation work to be done we > should > > promote it. We can mention it on the JOSM home page as sub project, we > can > > structure the work to be done, we can describe what we need, we can > provide > > one or two good examples and tell people that we need more of the same. > We > > can announce that we are looking for help on OSM dev, or on the german > list > > for translation, for instance to achieve some small goal until end of > > october (i.e. complete documentation of the conflict resolution dialogs). > > When we last had that discussion we improved the JOSM webpage and the > start page of JOSM to show most of the tasks to be done (the "How to help" > section). The notes to help translating using launchpad did have some > effect I think, but not very much at all. > > Lots of mails in the mailinglists never had an effect until now. > > Maybe something like a Google's "summer of code" would help, but I fear > this is only for coding and not for all the other stuff. But that goes > down to "pay for it", which I always say works for unwanted tasks. I also > would do JOSM documentation when I'm payed for it (but I'm not really > cheap :-) > > As maintainer I also do some of the stuff you mention above which you > don't see, but the results are usually very little. As this has been equal > for all projects I participated (which are really a lot) I decided for > myself that I wont spent a lot time for recruiting. When someone shows up > (like you or Jiri) I try a lot to encourage these people to stay, but I > don't actively search (which e.g. means I accept also patches which do not > follow my quality requirements or fight for the developers in discussions > even if I think myself they have been wrong :-). > > We develop free open source software. Development in this area has its own > rules and we can only live with them. I work in commerical as well as in > open source area (and also do strategic decisions in both areas) and after > longer experience you learn to respect the implicit rules. If you can show > me that my view is wrong I would be happy, but I fear most of the efforts > in recruiting help are better spent in UI improvements. The most important > factor of open source is the available time of its participants (which > BTW is not so different from commercial work). > > Ciao > -- > http://www.dstoecker.eu/ (PGP key available) > > > _______________________________________________ > josm-dev mailing list > josm-dev@openstreetmap.org > http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/josm-dev > _______________________________________________ josm-dev mailing list josm-dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/josm-dev
