[Talk-us] Increasing the number of US Mappers

[stevea]

The wiki is bubble-gummy enough to gin up a rough working skeleton of 
a project, but that's a bit geeky.

Our wiki doesn't necessarily foment dialog, conversation, multiple 
threads, sophisticated Facebook-automatic translation technology, 
(magic, as far as I know) like an old-fashioned tree-structured 
forum, with moderators and such.  I'll land somewhere around here, 
perhaps as Steve Coast says "US states" seem like a cleaving place (I 
don't want to put words in his mouth) and I agree:  US states is a 
natural place to continue cleaving hierarchical scattering and 
identification of specific communities.

The wiki is a rather rough-and-ready place for that (e.g. 
California/Railroads), but it isn't tree-structured forum like other 
places are.  We have a place for those dedicated to craftily building 
wikis, but that certainly isn't for everybody.  We talk of a place as 
we say "tree-structured forum-ish with a cleaving around US states is 
a place to go."  Sure, maybe next.  I might say it is an emerging 
consensus, but I must listen more.

Other places can be extended to be more statewide-conversation 
threaded, or perhaps something new and fancier can be dreamed of 
here.  With software, it is sometimes "wish" software:  a whisper 
along these lines gets mentioned in the right hallway or lunchroom, 
some dedicated volunteer finds some Libre/GNU code and 
tap-tap-hammers for a few days some custom scripts while listening to 
a community of consensus, and pow, we've got something.  OSM is a big 
project, and this could happen.  Heck, it might already be happening.

Build a good channel (forum-based-community...at least until the 
better next is here), and they will come.

I appreciate the listening that happens here.

SteveA
California