[Talk-us] Increasing the number of US Mappers

[stevea]

Simon Poole writes:
>forget scraping stuff from FB or any other commercial operator of 
>similar services (for legal/ToS reasons).

Fine, no scraping.  Even as the online communication world remains a 
Babel Tower of proprietary data islands, OSM can still create and 
continually improve what Simon and this thread seem to be expressing 
a serious need for us to better articulate:  "an integrated group 
facility which can support very fine grained and self-organized 
grouping of contributors with common interests (or whatever)."  That 
comes pretty close to describing what I would like to see emerge, so 
thank you for that articulation, Simon.

This is notwithstanding what Simon also mentions, that
>  "there is already the OSM forums which, depending on region, are 
>quite popular."

Yes, our forums are popular (and this is one of the "other places" I 
mentioned earlier), but they don't meet all our needs.  Do we keep 
them, grow them or discard them (once something better is built)?  We 
should leverage their popularity, to the extent they are (regionally).

Do we build this "integrated group facility" from scratch?  Using 
off-the-shelf (open-source) tools to get a jump-start?  How do we 
solicit input from our community to establish the feature set and 
overall design?  This is a long-term goal and has far-reaching 
consequences to grow mappers (in the US and elsewhere).  I strongly 
believe we should put serious effort into it, beginning with serious 
discussion.  This may or may not be the right forum to do so, but 
please:  let us not drop this dialog somewhere and fail to pick it up 
again.

I'm no Mark Zuckerberg or billionaire, but in 1983-4 I started a 
tree-based forum on University of California student open-access 
minicomputers.  I saw how quickly and powerfully it became an 
extremely popular, widely-used communication medium precisely because 
of its "very fine grained and self-organized grouping of contributors 
with common interests."

OSM needs the same kind of medium.  Today, or soon.  It really WILL 
increase our number of mappers.

SteveA
California