[OSM-talk] [OSM-dev] Student Project Ideas?

[Ian Dees]

On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 10:21 AM, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason
<avarab at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 08:52, Graham Jones
> <grahamjones139 at googlemail.com> wrote:
> > Please give this a bit of thought, and add any ideas to the Wiki page!
> If
> > you don't have chance to do that, an email to me will do and I will add
> it.
>
> Here's my idea:
>
> Can we please not make things like "Develop a Simple, Stand-Alone
> Editor for New Users" part of the GSOC list.
>
> I've seen numerous failed and dead-on-arrival GSOC projects with
> various projects that usually turned out that way because
> inexperienced students were being handed projects that were too
> ambitious and even if they were finished saw decay because nobody else
> was interested in maintaining them.
>

I think a more useful criticism would include some specific ideas...

I agree that "Simple Editor for New Users" is way too nebulous and should
probably not be handed to a student. But perhaps someone has some ideas on
how to break up such an idea into more manageable chunks of work that we
could hand to students.

For example, one of the requirements in the "simple editor" that I've been
sketching in my doodle-notebook is to have an extremely fast "nearest way"
lookup. I imagine something like that could be written, documented, and
demonstrated in one Summer.

How about we ask a student to conduct a UX review (sit down with random
people and have them interact with OSM and observe) and write a report?
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