[Osmf-talk] A modest proposal for "spending some money"

[Simon Poole]

Am 29.09.2016 um 15:15 schrieb Andy Allan:
> On 29 September 2016 at 12:14, Simon Poole <simon at poole.ch> wrote:
>> and as chair of the likely largest spender (ignoring
>> depreciation) of OSMF funds outside of the board
> I think you overlooked OWG there :-)
Nope, see "ignoring depreciation". I know the OWG doesn't actually think
in such terms, but your costs are the hosting, expenses and any
purchases that are directly expensed, not the funds spent on large HW
purchases that are added to our assets.
>
>> The projects that come to my mind immediately for 2017 would be
>>
>> - group messaging
>>
>> - news dropdown (this was part of the original redesign proposal but
>> never got done)
>>
>> naturally opinions may differ on these, but they would seem to be
>> reasonably non-controversial and not involve amounts of money that we
>> can't afford.
> I respectfully disagree. At the moment we have a large codebase and
> very few people working on it. The moment the money is spent, we'll
> have a larger codebase, and still very few people working on it.
Very true, and that is why I've only suggested some in principle small
additions and not some gigantic bells and whistles rewrite.
>
> I would rather see time, effort and/or money being spent with the
> primary goal of encouraging more developers by making it easier to
> contribute to the code. I have a big long list of things that can be
> done in this regard, easily equal in terms of man-hours to what you
> suggest above.
>
> More information in a recent post:
> https://blog.gravitystorm.co.uk/2016/09/15/refreshing-the-openstreetmap-codebase/
I don't think doing the one excludes doing the other in this case. One
thing is sure: your work will pay off in making future work on the rails
port easier (and by that in the end cheaper). I doubt however if it will
in itself attract more rails devs. They haven't exactly been queuing up
and then leaving in disgust because it was too hard to contribute in the
past.

Simon

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