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

[Joe Richards]

How about a set of contact preferences?  It would be easy to say "allow other OSMers to contact me for mapping parties" etc.  Perhaps for old users this could be set to "on" by default, but we send them a little message so that they can change it straight away if they want to.

Something like the ITOWorld OSM Mapper would be great on the site (or at least linked to), so that people can see activity in their areas of interest
http://www.itoworld.com/static/osmmapper



----- Original Message ----
From: Emilie Laffray <emilie.laffray at gmail.com>
To: Russ Nelson <russ at cloudmade.com>
Cc: dev at openstreetmap.org
Sent: Sunday, 31 May, 2009 9:26:02
Subject: Re: [OSM-dev] finding OSM users by their home locations

Hello,

I guess it all depends on whether the users have accepted to make public
their location. I am not sure whether the site allows to decide whether
to make public or not your location.
Personally, while I understand your enthusiasm, I would find annoying to
receive a pre-formatted message asking me to do more for Open Street
Map. I am more than happy to help people in the same area as me, and I
actually did contact someone editing my hometown for that very purpose.
But I would get twitchy if it was done a mass scale.
This is a hobby project for me and I would consider your practice to be
a bit like bullying. But that's just me.
However, it varies from people to people and if they choose to make
their location public I see no reason not to send them an email. I just
wouldn't like it. The key thing is that you have to be careful about
privacy in this case.

Emilie Laffray

Russ Nelson wrote:
> The OSM webserver will tell you the ten people with home locations  
> closest to your home location.  It would be useful to be able to get  
> more than that, for the purpose of inviting people to attend mapping  
> parties so they can become more effective and enthusiastic OSM  
> contributors.  If you move your home location to the location of the  
> mapping party, you can get ten people, and if you move it around some  
> more, you can get more than just those ten.
>
> So, being intolerant of boring, repetitive activities, I've written a  
> program to find OSM users by their home location.  You give it a  
> lat,lon, and the radius in degrees of the circle in which you want to  
> find people, and it repeatedly changes your home location until it's  
> gotten everyone.
>
> Is this program a good thing or a bad thing?  If it's a good thing,  
> then great, I'll use it.  If it's a bad thing, then how do we stop  
> other people less cooperative than myself from writing the same program?
>
> --
> 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
>
>
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