[HOT] HOT/HDM web rendering

[Yohan Boniface]

Hi all,

Thanks for your great feedback!
And thanks Harry for tackling some of the answers :)
(By the way, I'm back in Paris these days ;) )


@Stéphane, David, Robert, about the legend needed: I totally agree on this!
We already have an issue for this: 
https://github.com/hotosm/HDM-CartoCSS/issues/44
I'm not sure how to handle this at the moment, but I'm sure that 1. we 
have to do it 2. it must be automatic, because it must always be up to date.
I will try to take time on this ASAP, but if someone is faster than me, 
the task is open :)

@Stéphane, Fran, about the wordlwide rendering
This is indeed something we want, and we will have.
On this I'm not sure of the right strategy for HOT.
My main point is that running a worldwide tiles service is quite 
expensive, on server side and on human maintenance side. Especially 
because I think that, nowadays, it doesn't make sense to run such a 
service without minute diffs, because it is very deceptive to make 
changes on the OSM database and not to see them before days or weeks. 
And this is still a fragile and human time greedy technology, imho.
So for me it doesn't make sense to set up such a stack for only one 
style to render, and so my opinion is that this is not something HOT 
should spend energy on. But this is only my personal opinion, and I may 
be wrong. ;)
But there are some community driven tiles server (OSM France has one for 
example), and also some professional ones (Thunderforest, MapBox...), 
and what we should do is to lean on such services.
Anyway, I know that we will host it on the OSM France server as soon as 
we think the style has reached a 0.1 stable version. But the more 
hosting services, the better. Centralization cost too much for community 
based services, I think.
So answer is: no official tiles service for now as far as I know, but 
quickly at least one non official worldwide.

@Robert, about collaboration: it would be really awesome to have you as 
contributors on this project!
There is many room for this. We really want this project to be a 
community driven project, just like all OSM projects.
Fist of all, if you have requests on the rendering, just create an issue 
on the Github repository, I will tackle it!
Then, if you have cartographers and/or CartoCSS experts in your team 
that want to participate, pull requests are really welcome.
Specifically on icons, there are tons of them to do, so if you have some 
designer that want to do some of them, it can really help. The only 
thing for now is to follow the maki design rules, to have a consistent 
set (icon todo list is also on Github issues: 
https://github.com/hotosm/HDM-CartoCSS/issues?labels=icon&page=1&state=open 
)


@all: as already said: don't hesitate to open issues for bugs, missing 
info, everything :)
And if you are not comfortable with Github, push an email, jump on IRC 
(#hot on oftc).
We want this rendering to be useful, and specifically useful for people 
on the field.

Thanks again for you feedback :)

Yohan



On 06/21/2013 07:28 PM, Harry Wood wrote:
> Yohan can speak for himself if he's on his emails from Haiti, but I think I can answer some of these questions.
>
> Roger Banick said:
>> if we have anything else in mind that might merit a place on the map, would we be able to discuss with you all further
>> and/or assist with symbology? We’re eager to be contributors and not just users
>
> Yohan's been beavering away on this on github, https://github.com/hotosm/HDM-CartoCSS
> including making use of the 'issues' to guide his work, so I guess he'll welcome your suggestions (and pull requests!) there.
>
>> Fran said:
>> I'd be keen to make this the default basemap for Sahana deployments.
>> You say that you'll be adding more countries - do you see this server
>> as being one which will be a reliable/scalable service we can point
>> users at or should we look to set that up elsewhere?
>
> Good question Fran.  I don't he's making any promises about the availability and scalability of his umpa.fluv.io server  .  Stephanie was also suggesting it be hosted at a shorter more explicit URL (This is trivial for a web map, but this suggestion applies to the tiles themselves)
>
> In general HOT would like to firm up some of the services we're using/dependent upon, hence this idea of having a sysadmin to install and oversee things: http://hot.openstreetmap.org/hot_tech_challenge_services_set_up_monitoring_and_administration    A tile server with this custom rendering could be such a "high availability" service. I think that would be a good idea. We wouldn't necessarily want to install mapnik & diff updating somewhere though, because we have a free Mapbox account, so that would be easiest. To be discussed.
>
> Harry Wood
>
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