[Talk-ca] Building Canada 2020 OSMGeoWeek Mapathons

[Andy Townsend]

On 19/10/2017 16:53, Tracey P. Lauriault wrote:
>
> But one thing is for sure if we want to do university to community 
> collaboration, and we want to experiment, teach and learn, flexibility 
> is required and maybe sandbox practice spaces or testing space.

Absolutely - I've become something of a broken record on OSM's mailing 
lists suggesting that people try things out on OSM's "dev" server or 
some other sandbox, and create their own copy of OSM's rendering server 
so that they can test out map style changes.  Using a different server 
will have knock-on effects if you're relying on other tools outside of 
OSM though (e.g. Mapillary - you'd need to talk to them about whether 
they can create something that works with a test server).

Before you started the assignment did you ask about any kind of sandbox 
(or even "ask about what you needed to ask about"?).  It's great that 
the local OSM community have got involved with help students out at eg. 
https://github.com/TraceyLauriault/COMS2200A , but I suspect that a bit 
more warning might have avoided people been taken by surprise.  "Find 
your local OSM community and talk to them about what you're planning to 
do" would probably be the 0th thing that I'd suggest for any academic 
project like this.

Additionally, it'd be great to know what other specifc feedback you have 
for other people planning similar things.  If there are specific 
outstanding general questions maybe 
https://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/ might be a good place to ask 
them?  It's not well suited to questions relevant to one mapper only but 
it's great for "how do I find out how to do XYZ with Overpass" or similar.

Best Regards,

Andy