On Feb 24, 2010, at 1:36 PM, SteveC wrote: > On Feb 24, 2010, at 8:47, Michal Migurski <m...@stamen.com> wrote: > >> If you don't do this, it will continue to seem like you're >> paraphrasing phantom newbies to support what's basically a turf war >> here on the list. > > Mike it seems obvious to me. I've run more mapping parties than > anyone and been to more conferences. Through the CM ambassadors it > was the same story. > > It was as I recall your basic and longstandig set of complaints, do > you remember?
No, I believe you, and I totally sympathize with the point that the newbie experienced should be improved. But in what direction? Tell us something specific that these newbies said! Actually, re-read the very end of my last mail, where I quote Eric's experience with asking people what they think of something the first time they see it. Negative reactions are a normal first response to surprise, and they may not be the response that teaches us anything. Getting a second or third response, recording it and making it public here or on the wiki are important - it gives people someplace to hang their hat when discussing the many problems of newbies. My two biggest problems with OSM when I first joined have been basically addressed in the intervening years: I didn't like that the Mapnik layer took multiple days to reflect updates, and I thought Potlatch kinda sucked. Both of those things have been improved, the former through mod_tile (or something) and the latter through effort on Richard's end as well as my own growing familiarity with how it works. Turns out that spending a bit of time with the thing is beneficial. > But if it's really not credible then let's do it and get people just > to add a big and you can see how hard it is. Sorry, add a big what? > Mike you conveniently concentrated on my responses, did you bother > to read all the emails where I'm called a shit and a tosser etc? Are > they ok? Or is that all soley my fault too? I'll happily point you > at all the times I was flamed when not even doing anything bad, and > then we can look at how people like dhh and linus have to communiate > too. I'm sorry you've been called a shit and a tosser. I haven't done so. >> If you can articulate what it is that all these people get hung up >> on, >> then you will engage specific feedback. Right now, all I'm hearing is >> "Potlatch sucks" invoking the difficulty of the codebase and problems >> getting Richard to work on what you want. >> This is all back office >> stuff, nobody in the outside world cares and AS3 or version control! >> Make a case for improvements to the UI of Potlatch. > > I think I've gone further in actually building something and > sidestepping PL entirely. How you of all people can't see that a > simple feedback form is a step forward I don't know. There's nothing actually wrong with the feedback form, it's totally fine. It's not where I'd expect to send problems with the map data itself, but people who aren't familiar with the project might have all kinds of ideas about what they can or can't do. It's basically the same kind of thing as Google's "report a problem" link, another slightly clumsy but totally adequate way to address the issue of bad data. The form is not relevant to the question of the editor, however. Right now, I'm looking at the mockups in your post, and trying to understand why you're mixing in all this talk of problems with Potlatch with the front page design. What else is going to go behind that second tab? I think we're still left with the problem I identified in my mail, which is that vector and metadata editing are two unbelievably difficult UI problems and I'm thankful that the people behind Potlatch and JOSM have dealt with them in a their own ways. I've taken MapZen for a test drive, and it's actually pretty damn good. It's a full-on general editor, which I think makes it ineligible for the newbie conversation, but it doesn't suck and I see that you've just pointed out the GPL license. Good for Cloudmade! >> The second scenario, we paid people $5/day to visit the site, the >> event was already going on, and asked them to come in after a week. >> After asking them a few basic questions to verify that they'd >> actually >> visited the site, we asked them what we could do better. The >> suggestions were constructive, delightful, helpful. When asked >> whether >> they'd come back, basically all of them said yes that they'd be back >> every day to check in until the summit had been reached." > > I guess I'm genuinely surprised we really need to go to such > lengths, but hey. It seems sane to me. I'm willing to put up my own money to fund something like this. I think it could be done via Craigslist in a few communities to get real human beings to respond. I think it will also handle the Show Us The Newbies concern that I brought up, because it will create a pool of new users who might not otherwise come to a mapping party but can be given an incentive to spend a bit of time with the project for a few days. -mike. ---------------------------------------------------------------- michal migurski- m...@stamen.com 415.558.1610 _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk