[OSM-talk] Improving community within the OSM site

[Tom Carden]

On 23/05/06, Martyn Welch <martyn at welchs.me.uk> wrote:
> On Tuesday 23 May 2006 09:09, Erik Johansson wrote:
> > A "contact the users that edited this area" and "Messages for this
> > area" box on the left side when you edit would be great.
> >
>
> Simply more links to the Comunity Portals in more prominent places would
> probably go a long way towards achieving this. Most of the local pages have a
> list of interested parties.
>

I don't think mediawiki is good enough to support collaboration on
OpenStreetMap in the long term, and I think that tying them together
in the short term would just be setting us up for a fall.

That said, mediawiki's features such as full editing history for each
article and discussion/talk pages for each article could and should
have a useful equivalent in OSM, and it's something we've been talking
about for a long time.  And unifying the log-in across OSM and
mediawiki (like trac) wouldn't be a bad thing IMO.

Mediawiki style edit logs that list times and IPs, and usernames if
public, should be adequate... email addresses can come later.  I agree
that where someone edits isn't a major privacy invasion, and I also
think that the issue of making tracks public isn't OSM's problem (I'm
not a lawyer) given that we don't have a privacy policy... it's a
problem for anyone logging in with traceable details and submitting
sensitive information... caveat contributor, or something :)

Last.fm sticks "shout boxes" everywhere, allowing users to trade
messages around artists, albums, songs and each other.  It could be
neat to have shout boxes situated spatially, but we'd need to work out
whether they were evenly spaced (e.g. one every 250 meters) or placed
arbitrarily (eek, imagine the hell) or something else.

I'd also be in favour of something like Fotonotes, but for maps.
http://fotonotes.net/
They wouldn't have to be rectangular, they could be arbitrary
shapes... I think Jim's done some SVG/RDF stuff in that direction?

Tom.