[Design] SotM11: BoF meeting

[Gregory]

Sorry Tom, these were very rough notes that I typed while it was going on
and I'm not good at doing that. Nobody thought of doing this from the start,
it just became more clear I should continue as we went on. Think of it as a
bad cross between minutes and a summary, some comments are repeated when
they were discussed again and some comments are missing there pre-text. I
was hoping someone who was there would clean it up into a summary before(so
then) a discussion could be made on the mailing list.

Now replies to your questions in-line.

On 13 September 2011 16:32, Tom Hughes <tom at compton.nu> wrote:

> 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?

We should make a list, I stupidly don't know everyone's name but I got the
feeling I was the only one not on this list.
Attended: Gregory Marler, Mikel Maron, Matt Amos, Steve Coast(not from the
beginning or all the time), ...

It was advertised on the Unconference board. We were disappointed less than
10 people were there.


>
>
>  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.
>
Use cases/define audiences/personas were part of the same conversation.

How about we have an open invite to write some of these (this would make the
wider community feel involved in the Round 0 stage, so they are happy when
designs start being made), then the Strategic Working Group(or some other WG
or the board?) approves certain ones we meet.
Personally I think we should try to support (in some way) as many possible
users as we can. At the moment the home page only supports those who want to
view the map, and a few others by small links (e.g. help centre link).


 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...
>
There was the idea that we make encouragement for designs to be merged as
they are commented on. Was there a competition for some OSM logo that did
this already?


>
>  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.

Indeed. There will also be people that object to whatever changes are made
(you can't please everyone).
We thought it was good to get the community feeling involved early on. We
also talked about statistics to back up any changes that are made (e.g. the
eye tracking studies that were done for Potlatch).


>
>
>  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.

The conversation merged (I'm not sure when) into a discussion about map
design. One of the Stamen Design guys was asking if it was possible to
change the style. I guess he wasn't aware the default mapnik style does get
tweaked and is open to some suggestions.


>
>
>  Comic Sans - that's a great idea
>>
>
> See my dead body? No. Good, so that one won't be happening ;-)

Yeah, save killing yourself for us and know that was a joke.


>
>
>  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.
>
I think this was the discussion about having alternative layers more obvious
for switching between. It was commenting that it causes design problems and
user-over-choice to list loads.
There is a wiki page that suggests points layers would have to meet to be
considered on the site, followed by a list of potential layers to use. I
think that's good.


>
>  Dynamic POI layer?
>>
>
> Not sure we have the technology/resources to support this, but happy to be
> proved wrong.

It was a comment made thinking about the future (potentially in 6 months?).
I think there are currently 2 types of things to do client side/dynamic
rendering.

>
>
>  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.

Ah oops, I didn't think about that. I guess I was too busy noting down what
people were saying at that point.

>
>
>  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.

There were some thoughts about dramatically changing the cartography, e.g.
rendering less stuff. But just displaying the same things as Google etc.
wouldn't make it clear OSM was different. Also, lots of people use it to
confirm their edits have been acceptable.

>
>
>  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<http://stats.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/awstats.pl?config=www.openstreetmap.org>
>
> Not sure that they help much though.
>
Yep, I didn't hear all the statistics people were talking about that they
wanted. Steve said something about Google Analytics wouldn't be possible
because it wasn't free/open enough and their were problems with that for
some reason.


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



-- 
Gregory
osm at livingwithdragons.com
http://www.livingwithdragons.com
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