Well let me take that back a bit - actually even doing some very simple cleanup of the interface and having a feedback mechanism *at all* would be a good first step, as people jumped on my recent OGD post in the comments:
http://opengeodata.org/the-importance-of-timing-to-feedback On Jun 17, 2010, at 7:27 PM, SteveC wrote: > I think you're concentrating on tiles, but that's not really the bottleneck I > would jump on first. > > The conversation goes like this: > > "steve we have 300 million people a day look at our site and we would like to > send their edits and feedback to OSM" > > Really it's the API we're talking about. Tiles are just a CDN problem. > > > On Jun 17, 2010, at 7:18 PM, Frederik Ramm wrote: >> Steve, >> >>> They would like to link to us directly but don't think a) we can >>> handle the load and b) don't think it would be a good user experience >>> to dump people on to osm.org, what with the site design. >> >> To paraphrase (not specifically Wolfram, but the unnamed other megacorps >> you're chatting with): >> >> 1. they'd like to link to us directly but our infrastrucutre is too weak; >> >> 2. they would not want to give us a shitload of money to improve our >> infrastructure, but could imagine hosting something; >> >> 3. there is fear that the community would view this negatively. >> >> To which I say, I don't think the community has anything against someone >> doing a glorified maps.cloudmade.com; if they have really fast servers and >> maybe even a CDN, can do lots of styles and make the tiles and services >> available under a free-for-all policy. That would be great, and would - if >> given sufficient long-term promise by whoever it is - allow us to reduce our >> tile serving to an experimental capacity, freeing up resources for the core >> database which obviously we must keep operating ourselves. >> >> But there is a logical problem here and that has nothing to do with us at >> all. You say that many would like to link to OSM directly if only OSM had >> sufficient resources. Now assume that some big guy with many enemies, say >> Google, or Microsoft, were to offer super-fat tile serving for OSM as I >> outlined above. We would then scale back our own tile ops to a minimum, and >> their server would be the main OSM tile server, and whenever you go to >> www.osm.org your browser says "connecting to osmtile.google.com" or some >> such. >> >> I think that the community would be less of a problem - I don't think many >> would care if our tiles came from MS or Google or so as long as they were >> unrestricted and the data remained free. But all those other big guys, of >> whom you say that they would like to link to us - would *they* want to send >> their users to get tiles from Google, MS or someone else? Or would the "we'd >> like to link to you but your infrastructure cannot take the load and anyway >> your front page is ugly" then be replaced with "we'd like to link to you but >> you must understand that the 'sponsored by XYZ' on the shiny front page is a >> problem"? >> >> Of course things would be even worse if the big sponsor wanted to put the >> tiles or service under a non-open license (e.g. a license with a >> "noncommercial" component"). That, I think, would reduce overall usefulness >> rather than improving it. Any funded tile serving would have to be more open >> than what we can currently offer, not less. >> >> Bye >> Frederik >> >> -- >> Frederik Ramm ## eMail frede...@remote.org ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33" >> > > Steve > > stevecoast.com > Steve stevecoast.com _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk