[OSM-dev] User activity stream - progress update

[Paweł Paprota]

Hi all,

Back in August I made some noise on IRC and mailing lists about the
activity stream stuff. We had some discussions about technical approach
which were very useful to me. Since then I got side tracked with other
work, both OSM related and otherwise.

However, this weekend I've started implementing what I call
"OpenStreetMap Activity Server". You can learn more about it from
project description on GitHub:

https://github.com/ppawel/osm-activity-server/blob/master/README.md

The idea is simple enough: applications can publish activities to the
Activity Server and the server in turn is able to serve user's activity
stream - so Rails Port would retrieve such stream to display it on the
user page for example.

As for publishing activities, there are a few things I have in mind:

1. Mapping activity - an application would analyze current changesets
and publish activities to the Activity Stream so that users see what is
going on in their region. In addition, OWL could publish activities for
users interested in specific areas (although I have not looked into OWL
so not sure if this is feasible).

2. Diary entries - these could get more exposure through the activity
stream.

3. "Status update" activities - hopefully not like Facebook's "I just
ate a good sandwich" but more like "Let's go map the forest on
Saturday".

Well, these are just some ideas anyway...

Let me know what you think, feel free to comment on the code (which is
in a very early stage obviously) or on the idea in general.

PS. Excuse the cross post but I feel this is relevant both to users and
developers at this point (e.g. would be nice to hear if users actually
want something like this...).

Paweł