[OSM-talk] Fwd: [mySociety-maps] Re: [mySociety-devchat] Should we do this?

[Tom Carden]

FYI.

Over on the mySociety-maps list, a proposal for a site which might
help manage the local groups that Nick and others are suggesting,
without fragmenting/splintering the core community too early or
unnecessarily.

Not an endorsement from me right now, as I'm happy following the list
with its current level of traffic, but certainly something to watch.

Best,

Tom.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Tom Steinberg <tom at tomsteinberg.co.uk>
Date: 08-Jun-2006 12:46
Subject: [mySociety-maps] Re: [mySociety-devchat] Should we do this?
To: mysociety-devchat at mysociety.org, mysociety-maps at mysociety.org


Hello All,

Etienne Pollard has asked me to explain this geographic website idea
of mine more clearly. I thought I'd do so whilst bringing in the
70-odd new people who've signed up to mySociety-maps since we posted
our time travel maps a week or so ago.

So, the goal of this proposed mini-site is that it allows both
non-technical people and coders to run campaigns that are national or
global, but which have spontaniously emerging local chapters. The
guiding principle is simplicity - we provide the geographic component,
other people decide on what sort of social software they want to use
to let people work together.

Here's the spec:

* The campaign creator specifies the name of their campaign, enters
some further detailed text, a unique name for use as an easy URL, a
numerical threshold at which each local group will be considered to
have 'arrived', and an email address for themselves.

* The site generates a page for the global or national campaign that
anyone can sign up to. Cut and paste HTML will be supplied for the
campaign creator to put the signup process on their own site.

* When someone signs up, they enter their name, email and location.
The site then uses Gaze, our free global gazeteer webservice, to work
out where they are on the planet.

* Once their location has been established, the signer is made the
first person in the chapter for that location (see more below).

* At some point first of the groups, somewhere in the world, grows
until it passes the threshold. At that point two things happen:

 i - An email is sent to the creator with a simple comma separated
list of the email addresses of the signers, as well as their location.
This means relatively low  tech users can cut and paste into yahoo
groups, mailman, forum software or whatever.

ii - A secure, limited access feed of some sort (rdf, ascii, who
knows) spits out the list of email addresses and their locations. The
creator is the only person with the authentication information to
access this feed. If they are a coder they can do what they want with
these addresses. One common use might be to automatically create a
mailing list named after the location, populate it with users, and
send them a pre-written "what-next" email.


The location issue
-------------------

There is a design issue here - should the locations in which groups
come to exist be uinque, one queue of users for each placename in the
gaze database, or overlapping? ie Something like the first set of 10
people within any 10km radius circle becomes a group?


Anyway:

1) What do you think?

2) Where are the abuse/security weakpoints, and how should we tackle them?

3) What extra features could we add that would be really valuable and
not just feature creep?

best,

Tom

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