[OSM-dev] Student Project Ideas?

[Graham Jones]

Thank you all for your replies -  It is good to see people giving this issue
some thought.   I also see that the project ideas page has been updated
which is excellent!

There are some interesting suggestions in the above emails.  I'll try to
summarise where we are - please correct me if I am wrong.

   1. A number of suggestions for additional features for JOSM.  (A more
   visual object history presentation, reversion of specific objects to
   previous versions and a 'Mapping Anomalies' detection feature).  I don't see
   anyone disagreeing with these ideas, so I will add a 'JOSM Improvements'
   idea to the wiki and include a pointer back to this thread.
   2. A suggestion that the 'newbie editor' proposal should be removed in
   favour of encouraging students to contribute to existing editors, which are
   maintained actively.   I agree that we should encourage participation in
   existing projects - please suggest ideas!, but I think that a very simple
   editor could be achieved as a GSoC project given the very limited scope.
   It is very true though that what is on the wiki is nowhere near a project
   specification - I was kind of hoping that the proponents of the idea would
   pad it out for me!
   3. Split some of the more ambitious ideas into manageable tasks - I am
   all for that!   I think that I may be viewing this list slightly differently
   to some others - I see it as 'ideas' from which potential students can
   construct a 'proposal', taking account of the time available etc.   I see
   thinking through the proposal to decide what is achievable as an important
   part of the up-front consideration for the student - They will probably need
   some steers from people on this list to help them decide on that [see
   below].
   4. A more 'project management' oriented project where there may be more
   time spent specifying than coding.   We would need to check the rules
   carefully, but I think you can demonstrate quite easily that for User
   Interface based projects, the planning, discussing, agreeing part is more
   important than the coding - putting together a UI is not that hard - putting
   one together that the average casual user finds intuitive is difficult, so
   well worth the planning time.
   5. An interesting suggestion to improve the 'History' list, which would
   also help the rendering process - I liked the sound of this as this is one
   of the few suggestions for projects involving the 'core' of OSM.  The reply
   suggested that this was already being worked on - is the solution actually
   progressing, or would it be useful to see if a student was interested in
   looking at it?  It is an opportunity to nurture someone to understand the
   innards of OSM?
   6. A suggestion for testing an alternative web based map viewer
   (presumably against OpenLayers?).   This is an interesting idea, but I am
   struggling to turn it into a 'code' project - or is the 'code' part of it
   the development of the test suite to fire requests to the different viewer
   applications?

So, thank you all for your efforts - please keep thinking to see if you can
come up with anything else, especially in the 'core' parts of OSM.

On this I did just try to look for the API 0.7 feature list, but can't find
it - is anyone thinking about what the next version of the API will do, or
do we think we are about there, and we are actually using 1.0?   If there
are features to add, then these could be potential projects?

A final point (plea?) - I would like to encourage potential students to seek
the views of more experienced contributors on their ideas using these lists,
as you will be able to make a better judgement of the amount of effort
required to do something than they will - please bear this in mind if you
see queries from new people, and be constructive in your replies!

Thanks


Graham.


-- 
Graham Jones
Hartlepool, UK
email: grahamjones139 at gmail.com
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