Hi,
On 01/08/2013 12:02 PM, Paweł Paprota wrote:
Providing a modern, well-integrated and usable main website for OSM
is a great challenge I would like to take part in. If you don't think
this is a good goal for the community then that's fine, after all
it's an open community so everyone can work on what they want to.
Definitely! Many of the best things in OSM on which we now rely
heavily - including Mapnik which renders our maps, Osmosis which is the
foundation for all our data replication server and client side, or
various editors - have been started by individuals who did this because
they, like you, had fun in doing it. Even essential parts of today's
data model have been developed in that fashion ("Look, I built something
cool, what do you think about it?").
That is exactly the approach that I would recommend if someone were to
ask me how to "move forward" - have a small discussion if you want but
essentially, just build the damn thing, or at least a prototype for
people to play with, and get people interested.
It often takes longer than expected; I remember approaching Dennis, the
man behind OSRM, about three years ago, asking him if he saw any options
to make their university routing engine usable for OSM. A lot has
happened since then and I'm convinced we'll have some sort of routing on
openstreetmap.org in due course but I wouldn't have thought that it
would take so long. Dennis has meanwhile chosen to showcase their
algorithm on a server of their own at project-osrm.org but that's not a
bad thing; they received a lot of valuable feedback and were able to
improve their engine and by the time we'll run it on osm.org it will be
relatively mature.
Building stuff on your own gives you the freedom to go down whatever
path you want, and if you build good stuff then it will eventually come
closer to the OSM core, and possible even be added to the central web
site. But even without being run and operated by OSMF, stuff can be
tightly integrated - think the OpenCycleMap which is directly accessible
from our main page, or think TagInfo which is tightly integrated with
the Wiki, both on platforms that operate separately. I'd also love to
integrate some of the (proto)social features that Pascal has built - the
heatmaps and the "contributors in your vicinity" maps. After these
things have existed for a while and when the community has found them
usable, why not approach the makers and talk about integration with our
main site while still having things separately operated? The model
certainly doesn't work for everything but I think an "ecosystem" is more
than just coders working on the rails port.
That also helps to keep complexity down.
Bye
Frederik
--
Frederik Ramm ## eMail frede...@remote.org ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33"
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