[OSM-dev] finding OSM users by their home locations

[Russ Nelson]

On May 31, 2009, at 3:50 PM, Paul Johnson wrote:

> Matt Amos wrote:
>
>> in my opinion it's evil to contact users who haven't opted in to be
>> contacted. it's a valid point of view that they implicitly opted in,
>> but i don't think this is what most users intended when they added a
>> home location - it's certainly not what i intended.
>
> I'm not sure it's a valid point of view beyond the current assumption:
> You want to hear from other OSM users trying to contact you, without
> necessarily revealing contact information.  It's generally OK to  
> assume
> people want to hear from other humans, but not OK to assume they want
> automated or bulk messages without them opting in first.  I think  
> trying
> to push beyond that might result in folks reporting OSM messages as
> spam, which is an annoying and sometimes expensive problem to fix.   
> Err
> on the conservative side of sending things en masse or automatically
> unless it's been specifically requested.

On the other hand, OSM is a community and it's fair to contact OSM  
users about OSM events.  So, what I've been doing to err on the  
conservative side, as Paul suggests, is to send email only to people  
who have 1) edited near 2) their home as they've marked it in OSM.   
The intersection of 1) editors near the party and 2) home users near  
the party is about 1/8th as large as the union.  I think that's  
reasonably conservative.  Unless we have a consensus for me to stop, I  
will continue this practice and help my fellow ambassies (it's a new  
word.  If nobody ever makes up new words, and we keep wearing out the  
old ones, we'll end up just grunting at each other) use it too.  It  
will result in less email sent, so is an overall decrease in any evil  
as Matt describes it.

--
Russ Nelson - http://community.cloudmade.com/blog - http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:RussNelson
russ at cloudmade.com - Twitter: Russ_OSM - http://openstreetmap.org/user/RussNelson