[josm-dev] Changed presets, "contact"

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 12/17/2011 03:40 PM, Pieren wrote:
>> so by no means should we blindly take for gospel what the Wiki says.
>
> but the JOSM presets, yes...

There is a sad story behind this. From day one, presets were designed to 
be distributed. It was never the plan to have one central set of presets 
that the JOSM team would maintain and everyone would follow that. The 
idea was that interested users could make their own presets, and share 
them with others. "Look I've got this cool preset for waterway mapping, 
just add URL X to your config and you can use that!"

That system was set up with the best intentions, and it continues to 
function today - but nobody is actually interested in using it! 
Everybody just wants the one, central, official group of presets and 
that's it. We do have a handful of extra presets contributed by users 
but even those are hardly ever used.

This is sad; it would be so much better if there was a culture in OSM 
where people would mix and match, where they would say "I think Pieren 
is a good guy, therefore I'll use his presets, plus the special set of 
model airplane tagging presets from user HobbyFlyer3000".

But we can't do more than offer this - if people don't make use of it, 
then what can we do?

Maybe we should have a remote control functionality that adds presets. 
Then people could have cool web pages with an "add me to JOSM!" button 
and if you click on that, the preset is loaded ;) but I think even that 
is going to be little used.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"