Paul Norman wrote: > The problem is that if you make a discussion group too small, it > doesn't have enough activity to sustain interest in it. > > Larger regions might work, but even a statewide group abandons > the might meet for a geobeer idea where it takes 6 hours to drive > across the state. > > Unfortunately, I don't have any great ideas.
Groups on osm.org. Mailing lists only appeal to a certain subset of people. They look geeky, they require yet another login/subscription, and we all get too much email anyway. They're good for engaging the kind of people who like mailing lists, but these days that doesn't include a lot of tech-savvy people. The idea behind having groups on osm.org is to encourage self-organising communities, whether by region or topic. You don't have the hassle of finding out who the OSM lists administrator is, emailing them, convincing other people to join, etc. etc. You just go to osm.org and start a group. If it doesn't work because the area is too small/too big, no problem, you try another one. Users can join groups, and then when they post diary entries, can optionally tag them as belonging to the Oxfordshire group or the cycle-mapping group or whatever - and there you go, that's a discussion facility. Groups have bounding boxes which enables the site to suggest that people might want to join the group in the area they edit (maybe even on sign-up). So it's not a big change, but it makes much better use of the existing social functionality on osm.org (diary, home location, etc.) than we're already doing. We got some way with implementing it but the effort stalled; I got stuck trying to figure out how pagination works on osm.org! But I would love to see coding resume on it and will happily take part if it's not just me working solo. http://groups.apis.dev.openstreetmap.org/diary http://groups.apis.dev.openstreetmap.org/groups/4 https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/pull/297 cheers Richard -- View this message in context: http://gis.19327.n5.nabble.com/Increasing-the-number-of-US-Mappers-tp5857059p5857085.html Sent from the USA mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
