[OSM-dev] Using native social SDK for signing in to OSM on mobile

[Ilya Zverev]

My answer is, absolutely. If a random person walking with their phone adds opening hours or marks a shop closed, I don't care if she/he is a part of community or not. Having them logged in with an OSM account makes them contactable, and that's all we need.

I think it's time to stop taking OSM for a playground of a few geo-geeks. There are thousands of people who fall for "free and open wiki map", and millions who don't care, but who use our map and want to have the freshest data on it. Can we allow people with a slightly less responsibility here? Again, they are signing with their social accounts, that give much more private information about them, than an e-mail address. They are surely as contactable as regular OSM users.

As for 5 seconds, I am not proposing to drop CTs and descriptions of the project on sign up. Note that the original post is about signing in, not signing up. Of course, signing up would also be made easier, but I agree that new users, no matter how casual, should agree to CTs and learn a couple things about OpenStreetMap. This can be made a part of a policy for allowing apps to use OSM official social accounts.

IZ

> My question is: Do we want to encourage casual editing?
> 
> And my answer is "not 100% sure but perhaps rather not".

> There are some benefits to casual editing; if people could just fire off a quick edit to something without even signing in then surely we could get more people to do just that - upload a quick OCR'd photo of shop opening times or whatever. Point, shoot, upload, bam! - OSM improved in 5 seconds. I see that benefit and I would like to have it.
> 
> But I also view us OSM contributors as a community. We share something. We care for this project together. We participate in various communication channels. We watch our backyard. We chat up new users and invite them to meetings.
> 
> I think it is important for people to make a decision to join this community. This decision is not just a quick "I agree" screen where you put your work under a certain license; it also means you should know that you're signing up for something here; that you take responsibility; that you have to be contactable, and will be contacted, about your contributions.
> 
> Making it too easy to breeze through the signup process, on a mobile device, using your stored credentials from elsewhere - how can we expect anyone who signs up this way to understand what this project is about, what he's signing up to?
> 
> "Making signup easier" is certainly a good goal to have, but signup includes getting people to understand OSM. A workflow that lets people sign up in 5 seconds but lands us with users who don't even know what the consequences of their actions are is not a step forward, it is detrimental to the project in my opinion.
> 
> This is not saying you shouldn't write an easy to use mobile editor, or you shouldn't attempt to reduce the mobile signup workflow to a few clicks, but from anyone who ships an app that does quick signups I'd like to see a concept of how they intend to make sure that users understand what they are signing up for (legally and socially).