[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



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