[Osmf-talk] February OSMF Board Meeting

[Gervase Markham]

On 26/02/10 09:30, Frederik Ramm wrote:
> Anyone who is unhappy with the main page can create suggestions or work 
> with those who maintain the page; as it has always been done in OSM for 
> everything.

Sometimes incrementalism can only get you so far. Occasionally you have
to sit down and redesign something, trying to take everything into
account at once.

A good example of this is the UI of the Mozilla Suite (now Seamonkey)
back before Firefox came along. I don't know if you remember that; but
the point was that lots of people "just adding their bit" led to a UI
that was far too complicated. The cleaner, much more usable UI of
Firefox was the result of a small group sitting down and thinking about
what was really essential in a browser.

Similarly, I think it would be good if a group of core project people
with an expressed interest were to sit down, take input, and think about
the best, simplest and most consistent way for us to present our public
face to the world.

I entirely agree the group should be made up of people with a track
record of interest in and involvement with these things.

> I also fear that whatever the outcome of such a "working group", people
> would tend to respect that too much, leading to stagnation: "Can we
> change this on the front page?" - "Sorry pal, you've got to raise this
> matter with the working group, they spent 5 days discussing about how
> big the donation box should be and we cannot simply change it now...".

You mock, but what's wrong with thinking hard about a design, executing
it and then sticking to it in the face of lots of calls to "just add my
thing here"? A lot of good UI design is saying "no".

Oh, and can we take the front page out of robots.txt?
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.openstreetmap.org

It makes it impossible to see what the site has looked like in the past.

Gerv