[OSM-talk] Map features discussion & voting

[Andy Robinson]

Tom Chance [mailto:tom at acrewoods.net] wrote:
>Sent: 11 June 2007 11:00 AM
>To: Andy Robinson
>Cc: Andy Allan; talk at openstreetmap.org
>Subject: RE: [OSM-talk] Map features discussion & voting
>
>
>
snip

>I'm really more concerned by the lack of discussion than any particular
>voting mechanism. My suggestion of a minimum number of votes was really a
>way to force a certain number of people to at least read and approve a
>proposal!
>

Putting this into perspective though, the masses out there have no interest
in discussion, they only have interest in doing. The fact that we have now
nearly 900 active editors in any given month yet only a handful who wish to
debate tags is an indicator of where we are headed. The masses will use a
dropdown in JOSM or Potlatch etc, the majority probably won't be bothered
about tagging something that's not in a dropdown or will want one central
place to find tag suggestions. If the database produced its own tag list
(with suitable filtering for obvious misspellings etc) then we could offer
tagging information to editor software on the fly. Before we can do that
though there is a need to better structure the tags so that editor software
knows that, for instance, a highway tag means something to do with roads
etc. (I'm taking a very simple example there). My talk at SOTM focuses on
the structure for tagging rather than the individual tags themselves as this
is where I feel we could do a better job and make life easier for users in
the future.

Cheers

Andy

Andy Robinson
Andy_J_Robinson at blueyonder.co.uk