[OSM-talk] mass mailing osm mappers

[Serge Wroclawski]

On Wed, May 12, 2010 at 5:13 PM, Robin Paulson <robin.paulson at gmail.com> wrote:

> are there any issues with mass contacting either (a) everyone who has
> set their location as in NZ, or (b) everyone who has made an edit
> within NZ? is there an AUP for osm which forbids this?
>
> and if not, is it possible to do this programmatically either through
> the wiki mail or the osm mailer?

Let's break these down into two parts, the social and technical aspects.

The social aspect is quite complex. I can see both sides. In the
United States, we had people sign up for something on a wiki page and
then we used OSM's internal message system to contact them. This is
something we only felt right doing because presumably they'd signed
up.

I've also contacted people in my local area manually about some local
activities, and I know others have done the same.

Of course, such a thing could easily be abused, so I'd say it should
be used sparingly.


As for the technical aspect... There are two parts to that- the
collection of usernames and the message sending.

The request to collect/send to lots of people in an area is a feature
that's been requested and discussed, and there are lots of ways to
gather this data, but all of them have problems. You might go through
profiles looking for people who have tagged their location, or you
might look at commits and determine whose been editing in an area.

As for sending mass mail, there's no programatic way. There's no API
to do it, but there are those of us on this list (myself included) who
have written scripts to do it in an automated fashion. My code is
based on another OSMer's code. I don't think either of the scripts are
posted online anywhere, for obvious reasons. It's not hard to write,
actually.

- Serge
> cheers
>
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