[Openstreetmap] update

[Tom Carden]

On 2/9/06, Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se> wrote:
>
> I must admit I didn't understand what Tom meant with his comment,
> so I'd welcome him to clarify this.  What is a "flickr of maps"
> and how would that work?  I have some photos on flickr and nobody
> can edit them.  Flickr is a for-profit company that sells premium
> services and that was acquired by Yahoo.  Which of these aspects
> could OSM emulate?  No, I'm not sarcastic, I really want to know.
>

Yes, I admit that just throwing "Flickr of maps" out there isn't a
great way to describe what I mean, but basically what I'm talking
about is a shift in emphasis from pseudo-anonymous uncredited editing
of maps to socialising *around* maps.  What Jyri Engestrom identifies
as "object-centered sociality"
http://www.zengestrom.com/blog/2005/04/why_some_social.html

Let's make cool tools that sit on top of a mapping layer, and make
that mapping layer publicly editable.  Let's make good maps happen as
a by-product of the fact that people have stories to tell, and want to
make map to do it.

It would be about users feeling like they had some real shared
ownership of the data, and some kind of presence on openstreetmap.org.
 You would be able to go to any user and see what maps they had been
editing recently, and what they had to say about those areas.

Taken to it's extreme conclusion, when I get home from a trip I upload
my photos to flickr.  I'm sure lots of you already routinely upload
your GPX tracks to OpenStreetMap.  If it was totally analagous to
Flickr, I could see your latest tracks, comment on them, add tags, etc
- and those tags would be associated with you, as well as the map.  At
the moment, OSM's "tags" are just subsumed into one great whole...
they aren't personal, they aren't fun, and I don't think they're tags
at all in the same sense as del.icio.us or flickr has tags.

I should be concentrating on other things so I'll leave it there, but
hopefully you can see how this would be very different to wikipedia
(not as freeform, not as anonymous, more room for egos, etc).  But you
can also see how a site like this might appeal to different people
than we appeal to now.

The two approaches could live side by side, of course, and what I'm
talking about could sit on top of a 'wikipedia of maps', but I'd like
to see them tightly coupled together so that people almost build the
maps by accident, just because they have something to say about them. 
I'm not saying it's better, I'm just turning it on its head and seeing
how it looks.

Interested in your thoughts,

Tom.