[Talk-us] Increasing the number of US Mappers

[Bryan Housel]

Agree with everything you said about *why* groups are important, except that: now that it's 2015, Facebook groups is really a better place for this.


> On Oct 15, 2015, at 3:43 AM, Richard Fairhurst <richard at systemed.net> wrote:
> 
> Paul Norman wrote:
>> The problem is that if you make a discussion group too small, it 
>> doesn't have enough activity to sustain interest in it.
>> 
>> Larger regions might work, but even a statewide group abandons 
>> the might meet for a geobeer idea where it takes 6 hours to drive 
>> across the state.
>> 
>> Unfortunately, I don't have any great ideas.
> 
> Groups on osm.org.
> 
> Mailing lists only appeal to a certain subset of people. They look geeky,
> they require yet another login/subscription, and we all get too much email
> anyway. They're good for engaging the kind of people who like mailing lists,
> but these days that doesn't include a lot of tech-savvy people.
> 
> The idea behind having groups on osm.org is to encourage self-organising
> communities, whether by region or topic. You don't have the hassle of
> finding out who the OSM lists administrator is, emailing them, convincing
> other people to join, etc. etc. You just go to osm.org and start a group. If
> it doesn't work because the area is too small/too big, no problem, you try
> another one.
> 
> Users can join groups, and then when they post diary entries, can optionally
> tag them as belonging to the Oxfordshire group or the cycle-mapping group or
> whatever - and there you go, that's a discussion facility. Groups have
> bounding boxes which enables the site to suggest that people might want to
> join the group in the area they edit (maybe even on sign-up). So it's not a
> big change, but it makes much better use of the existing social
> functionality on osm.org (diary, home location, etc.) than we're already
> doing.
> 
> We got some way with implementing it but the effort stalled; I got stuck
> trying to figure out how pagination works on osm.org! But I would love to
> see coding resume on it and will happily take part if it's not just me
> working solo.
> 
> http://groups.apis.dev.openstreetmap.org/diary
> http://groups.apis.dev.openstreetmap.org/groups/4
> https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/pull/297
> 
> cheers
> Richard
> 
> 
> 
> 
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