[Talk-us] Increasing the number of US Mappers
stevea
steveaOSM at softworkers.com
Thu Oct 15 18:48:29 UTC 2015
Steve Friedl writes:
>There is no single solution that will please or attract everybody;
>speaking for myself, if the only way to participate is to join yet
>another forum, I'm pretty sure I would not bother, and in practice
>these side forums often fail to develop a critical mass sufficient
>to make it thrive.
So, recognizing that "side forums" do and will exist, support them
(with ideas like a Facbook bot that rolls into a central-to-OSM
repository those discussions in their own "room.")
>I do understand that many don't care for Facebook, and the tone of
>some is similar to the frothing anti-Microsoft rants of the GNU
>folks, and that's fine for them, but not everybody feels that way,
>and avoiding a large pool of willing participants - especially the
>younger ones - just because not everybody will choose to play seems
>like a missed opportunity.
I'm not saying to avoid, just make things more OSM-centric, and watch
as people flock there. Not everyone will, I recognize, but tools
that plug into them and "flow back" can reduce or even eliminate
missed conversations being "islanded" in one place vs. existing at
the "definitive" (OSM-centric) locus. Yes, this comes at a price of
modest effort and duplication of threads, but initial costs can be
small, and bandwidth/storage are cheap.
>Sometimes one has to choose between being right or being effective,
>and this sounds like one of those times.
I don't know about that, I'm saying we can do both: right AND
effective. Some initial effort is involved, (as it always is) and
then it can run largely on auto-pilot -- some administration and
maintenance -- and those costs remain relatively small.
Is this much different than the many forum-style softwares that are
out there? An organization/project as big as ours would need it to
scale to a relatively large size, but that can be done. Should such
a system have a modular approach to importing data from other
platforms, well, Bob's Your Uncle (a successful result is obtained).
SteveA
California
More information about the Talk-us
mailing list