[Design] SotM11: BoF meeting

[Tom Hughes]

On 12/09/11 00:42, Gregory wrote:

> At SotM 11 we had a BoF informal meet-up outside. I took some rough
> notes. It would be good if someone could clean them up, then they can be
> sent to the talk list as there weren't many people there.

Who exactly took part in this little side channel chinwag?

> Need to know use cases

Agreed - we just need to be careful to make it the use cases we want to 
support rather than all the use cases anybody on the talk list would 
like us to support.

> Define our audiences

Agreed, which maps back to my point about which use cases we want to 
support.

> Personas

Don't understand what this means?

> 1st round: submit mockups/explanations to show your ideas
> then voting/commenting so the leading ideas come through
> don't throw away full ideas, maybe take aspects from each

We need to be careful here - design by popular vote is not usually a 
good idea...

> Get the community very involved in Round 0: creating a design brief.
> Ask a survey. What do you want on osm.org <http://osm.org> % of how much
> you want it

If you go down this route somebody has to be ready to stand up to the 
community and say no to bad ideas, no matter how much support they get.

I can guarantee you, based on past experience, that you will get a lot 
of ideas, some of which will have lots of vocal support, but which will 
still be bad ideas.

> Any stomach for changing the cartography
> yes.

Is that stomach in the people that do the cartography? or the people 
that were present for the discussion? was there any overlap?

I'm not saying we shouldn't change it, just interested in the background 
to this statement.

> Comic Sans - that's a great idea

See my dead body? No. Good, so that one won't be happening ;-)

> Default render has too much pressure on it
> unlike MapQuest/Google, we have infinate layers

No we don't. We may have the possibility of adding infinite layers, but 
we don't actually have them. Of course literally speaking infinite, or 
any large number, is probably a bad idea anyway.

> Dynamic POI layer?

Not sure we have the technology/resources to support this, but happy to 
be proved wrong.

> Cookie to save your favourite style

Sure. We could call it something like, oh I don't know, how about 
_osm_location. We could use it to store the current location and active 
layers, or something like that.

Oh damn, I forgot, THAT'S WHAT WE ALREADY DO.

> Default map has to be more detailed, distinct from  all the other online
> maps

Has to be? I think you misspelt "the sample of people present thought it 
ought to be".

Then again I would argue that it's already more detailed than just about 
all other online maps, at least in areas where we have rich data.

> Can we get stats from Grant/Matt

The stats that we have are here:

http://stats.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/awstats.pl?config=www.openstreetmap.org

Not sure that they help much though.

Tom

-- 
Tom Hughes (tom at compton.nu)
http://compton.nu/