[OSM-dev] OSM Wishlist (community wishlist built experimentation)

[Paweł Paprota]

On 10/18/2012 05:04 AM, sly (sylvain letuffe) wrote:
> I do, but as you said, alone isn't gone be an easy task, that's why I'll soon
> be proposing this on talk, with the hope to get the help of everyone. I have
> just no ideas if something usefull could get out of this, if that won't just
> turn to chaos, but I guess I'll have to try to find out.
>

It's great that you are driving this. One potential use of such list 
would be defining the Top Ten Tasks list. Year is coming to an end, I 
imagine a revised list is in order soon. User community feedback could 
be one of the factors when deciding what to put on this list.

> As a starting point, I have cleaned-up
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/API_v0.7 into what I consider ideas for
> development ranging from good to improvable with a good idea behind.
> I've also turned it into less technical and, hopefully, understandable to long
> standing non-dev mappers.
 >
> However, it is not limited anymore to what people think should go into the
> next API 0.7 version (I think it's even worse when you ask non-techies people
> to find a solution themself) but to something gathering ideas of wishes they
> find usefull for their work as mappers, what they miss more while editing (may
> it be external tools, websites, software or, of course API improvements).
>

I'm really starting to think that this page (API 0.7) should be taken 
apart... things like "Make the web interface accessible" have not much 
to do with the API and are simply getting drowned in all the "techy" 
ideas for low-level API improvements.

That's why I think an effort like yours - to clean it up and make it 
human-readable is needed.

> here it is, self-explained :
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Contributors_functionalities_wishlist
>
> If anyone here wants to give feedbacks before it goes to talk, please do.
>

The page looks good. In addition I would consider couple of things:

* From my experience form of presentation matters when trying to explain 
complex things to people. Right now there is a lenghty first paragraph, 
there is no Table of Contents. Small things like that can be easily 
fixed and they make content more presentable.

Of course there is always the question if we really care about people 
who have so short attention span that they can't get through a large 
chunk of text but that's another discussion...

For now I would suggest splitting the content into sections as much as 
possible (especially the first paragraphs into something like 
Introduction or Rationale or What is it?) and putting Table of Contents 
on the page.

* Similar to above point - page title. I would suggest something that 
"rolls off the tongue" which "Contributors functionalities wishlist" 
does not do exactly :-) Perhaps something like Community wishlist or 
similar?

* I would toy with the idea of changing how specific wishlist items are 
presented - I think having some structure like a table with description, 
discussion and status and perhaps use colors to mark what is being 
worked on etc. This would further improve readability.

Ironically, none other than the Top Ten Tasks list has a good example of 
this, see template:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Template:TopTenTask

I would think about making similar template but more community-focused 
so no technology list but something more useful to non-developers.

 From my side I would love to see someone from the community get 
involved in current development. For example, right now we are on the 
brink of having Gravatar support merged into the osm.org website:

https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/pull/131

There are some very important privacy questions asked in that discussion 
but I don't think anyone from the end-user community even read those...

What would be great if someone would create a blog or a diary dedicated 
specifically to reporting on OSM development activity - something like 
"OSM This Week" list that already exists. On such blog people could get 
easily involved without having to create a Github account etc. and the 
blog author would feed back the comments to developers.

Keep up the good work - this effort is really useful.

Paweł