On Sun, May 16, 2010 at 21:43, SteveC <st...@asklater.com> wrote:
Some selective replying...
> Have a look at waze's twitter feed. *That* is the kind of community
> building we need to be doing now.
Agreed, but you personally control the openstreetmap twitter account
don't you? If you think waze's twitter account is nice (what it mostly
does is answer a bunch of user questions, which implies a dedicated
support team sitting behind it). Then perhaps you should give other
people access to that account so they can field user questions under
the of OpenStreetMap banner.
This is perhaps unfairly snarky, but maybe then we'd have more user
help from @openstreetmap and less stuff like this:
http://twitter.com/openstreetmap/status/13991402867
That isn't representative of the typical tweet from @openstreetmap,
but unhelpful stuff like which you seemingly sent to the wrong account
does pop up from time to time.
> Look at their site design. Look at mapzen. None of it's perfect, but
> it's generally a lot better than where we are.
I think it would be neat if Mapzen was optionally available on
OpenStreetMap.org, I asked you about this before[1] and you thought it
was too. Perhaps Mapzen's source repository could be hosted publicly
somewhere to make that easy?
More generally, I agree with your point that we should have more of a
"let's just do it" culture, but it also doesn't help much to have what
are essentially unfinished drive-by improvements like the website
redesign and now the logo which just seem to stir up a lot of dust,
and never go anywhere. I don't mean that it's your fault, just that
there's obviously a lot of disagreement about what we should be doing.
I we keep having these discussions because don't have any clear
direction for what we want to *do* with OpenStreetMap.org.
A lot of people here (including, it seems, the people that decide what
goes on the site) want openstreetmap.org to be just about the
data. That's fine, but at the same time the first thing a newbie sees
on the site is a giant map, suggesting we're trying to be some Google
Maps-alike.
The thing is, we make a very bad Google Maps, just compare stuff like
this:
http://maps.google.com/maps/place?cid=17295062644392818820
http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/node/427855410
I keep introducing people to OpenStreetMap and they keep asking me
questions like "that's neat, but how do I get directions", to which
the answer is "oh there's some third party service that does that,
just let me dig it up from some dungeon on the wiki real quick".
So how about this for a suggestion: Let's make a new tab on the
website to the left of "Map" called "About" or "Project" or something
like that. The content of that page would be raw HTML that would be
maintained on the wiki somewhere (with a preview before rollout).
This is how the http://wikipedia.org/ main page is managed[2].
Then the first thing you'd see when you go to openstreetmap.org would
be some context, you'd see that we're a data providing project but
that we have an example map.
You'd also note that there were a bunch of 3rd party projects that are
doing neat things (maposmatic, openstreetbrowse etc.). And that if you
wanted something more Google Maps like, or an alternate editor you
might enjoy CloudMade, Mapzen, JOSM etc.
While we keep fighting over what we should do, a lot of people are
already doing it in true OpenStreetMap fashion. They're just not
getting as much exposure as they might be getting if they were more
prominently advertised.
I volunteer to implement the required technical stuff, given that it
doesn't get shot down in the replies to follow.
1. http://www.mail-archive.com/d...@openstreetmap.org/msg10573.html
2. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Www.wikipedia.org_template
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