[HOT] [Tasking Manager] enhancements - testers required

[David Schmitt]

Hi Pierre,

thank you for working on the Task Manager. It is an important piece of 
S/W in- and outside of HOT.

On 2013-01-12 21:18, Pierre GIRAUD wrote:
> The most important (new) things to notice are:
>   - tiles can be accessed in a read-only mode,
>   - with this in mind, tiles url (in the address bar) can be used to be
> shared to someone else. This might be useful to use a tile as reference
> in a discussion between mappers,

That was something quite confusing about the task manager: you had to 
login to do *anything*. I see on the dev server, that it's still a 
requirement to login to browse the tasks. Is this really necessary? It 
would be nicer if a login would be *only* necessary for "write" actions, 
like locking/commenting ?

>   - you need to explicitly lock the tile before working on it,

So I can load and edit things without locking? To my engineering mind, 
that sounds like a recipe for conflicts. I do not understand the use 
case. Is there a workflow, where one needs to lock the task, but not 
load it into an editor? That would be better served with "lock", "lock 
and load".

With my UX head on, "lock" also sounds very technical and forebidding. 
Perhaps "Work on this" might be more inviting. Also in the history 
"Locked by ..." does not describe what's happening. "X started to work" 
or "X reserved the tile," might be more to the point.

BTW, would it be possible to get a link/integration to one of those 
whodidit services? Not everything that happens in a location is going 
through the task manager.

   https://www.google.com/search?q=whodidit+openstreetmap

>   - comments are now required when marking a task as done or
> (in)validating one,

What should users put there? Thinking back to the tiles I did, I can 
only remember one or two tiles where I felt a comment was required.

>   - users have access to the tile change history.

Which surely helps making comments more useful. But required?

> I'm not sure how important the locking is when an advanced user wants to
> (in)validate the work done on a job.
> How about allowing validation without any lock. Or maybe we should
> rethink the validation process.
> Any thoughts?

I think locking is important when the workflow "expects" the user to 
write to the tile.

Regarding the question of motivating people to re-take tiles for 
validation, this too (like "lock") might be a problem of the used word: 
"validation" sounds academic, important and of high responsibility. As a 
arm-chair mapper with only very little knowledge of the task's 
background, it is not my place to *validate* edits. Perhaps call it 
"second-pass"? That could lower the barrier. Also, I'm of the opinion 
that the data-user (in all of OSM) has to do her own validation to see 
whether the data is up to the required accuracy for the intended usage. 
Again this is not something someone from the wider community can do. 
Third, real validation can be done in batches, where much more than a 
single tile is pre-loaded into josm, background tiles are downloaded in 
batches and then quickly checked. This would not require locking or 
loading through the TM, but only invalidating or accepting the checked 
tiles.


Best Regards, David