[Talk-us] Community Involvement

[Hillsman, Edward]

I also agree that this would be an excellent idea (I just introduced a class of about 25 students to OSM last night, and I really would like something clean and organized to point future classes to). If someone can put together an outline of such a Beginner's Guide, I'm willing to work on a section of it, and help reconcile it with other sections as they get written. Richard, given your experience and obvious thought on the matter, could you maybe sketch a high-level outline to get us started?

Ed

Edward L. Hillsman, Ph.D.
Senior Research Associate
Center for Urban Transportation Research
University of South Florida
4202 Fowler Ave., CUT100
Tampa, FL  33620-5375
813-974-2977 (tel)
813-974-5168 (fax)
hillsman at cutr.usf.edu
http://www.cutr.usf.edu



> Date: Wed, 21 Jul 2010 10:07:32 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Richard Fairhurst <richard at systemed.net>
> To: talk-us at openstreetmap.org
> Subject: Re: [Talk-us] Community Involvement
> Message-ID: <1279732052442-5321954.post at n2.nabble.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>
>
> Apologies for butting in on your mailing list - thought this one was
> sufficiently non-US specific it deserved an answer.
>
> Toby Murray wrote:
> > Yes, navigation is a pain. The "map features" page is a pretty
> > good index of things to map but it often links to proposal or stub
> > pages (like the doctors page) that don't give a lot of information
> > about "how to map this feature" but rather offer discussions about
> > the tag or some OSM jargon that is not really helpful to
> > newcomers. The problem is that as one gains more experience
> > within OSM those pages DO become somewhat helpful so there
> > is little incentive for experienced mappers to change them to
> > make it better for new mappers.
>
> We desperately need a real OSM Beginners' Guide (rather than the apology
> that currently passes for one on the wiki), written by people who care
> about
> documentation, focusing on the basics, and liberally illustrated with pics
> and videos.
>
> And I hate to say it, but it shouldn't be open to general public editing -
> otherwise you get the situation at the moment where people come along and
> add their personal hobby horses every other day, and it degenerates into an
> unreadable, sprawling, unfocused mess.
>
> It's not just about tag documentation (to a certain extent, better editor
> presets are making that less important), but about a general introduction
> to
> OSM. A DokuWiki install on dev.osm.org, with a small team writing the core
> docs, would be a good way to do it. I'd love to have a go (after all, my
> day
> job is as a writer and editor), but what with Potlatch and all don't have
> the time to head up such an initiative. But it would be the single most
> useful thing anyone could do for OSM right now.
>
> I did suggest to Mr Weait of this parish that he might like to be involved,
> as he has a clear track record in writing nice how-tos on his blog. Maybe
> we
> could get a team together?
>
> cheers
> Richard
> --