[OSM-talk] Looking Forward

[Michal Migurski]

Thanks for the list, Frederick - a few worthwhile things to talk about here.

On Dec 24, 2011, at 5:02 AM, Frederik Ramm wrote:

> Our admins have recently published a list of "top ten tasks",
> technical things they'd like to see implemented sooner rather than
> later.

Can you link to these, please? Sounds interesting.

Two things in your mail, from the introduction and the first issue, seem related:

> The OSMF is very much concerned about making sure that user experience
> is improved and that it becomes easier for everybody to contribute to
> OSM, shedding our image of being a project for geeks and enthusiasts,
> and I've heavily contested that on osmf-talk.

...

> 1. Strict Tagging Rules
> 
> ...
> 
> The project changes, and the bold and autonomous mappers of the first
> few years (who often had a whole city to themselves) are in decline; we
> have more people who actually *want* to be told what to do. But with
> many of the sensible people in our project being from that bold
> generation and not wanting to create rules for others, we end up with
> rules being made by people with strange ideas whose main spare time
> activity seems to be rule-making rather than mapping, and voted on by
> people who cannot grasp the consequences.


The user experience and tagging rules both touch on the issue of setting expectations for new mappers. They've heard of OSM, visited the page, and now what? I believe that making it easier for new users to participate in smartly-sized chunks should be a priority, and the current experience of the site makes it difficult to approach the project. Once there, the choice of tagging rules would strongly influence the ease of participation. Wikipedia's idiotic acronymocracy repels casual, knowledgeable contributors—restrictive tagging rules for OSM could have the same effect.

The home page for OSM Philippines is a model of how OSM.org should welcome users:
	http://openstreetmap.org.ph/

I just deleted all my browser cookies and visited openstreetmap.org as a new user. Instead of a map that shows OSM's strengths as a large-scale data set, I see a zoom=4 view of the whole US. Instead of an invitation to come edit the map, I see a grayed-out tab that tells me to "zoom in to edit" when clicked. The Philippine page, by contrast, clearly shows three possible actions (view, edit, and get involved) and includes links to zoomed-in views of major cities that better convey the coverage of OSM data. The main wiki at http://wiki.openstreetmap.org is probably the closest approximation at the international level, but it's only linked from the main page as "Documentation".

A solution to the new-user experience and tagging rules issues could take the form of a project welcome page that lays out clear ways that new users can get involved, by setting out "missions" based on our knowledge of the existing data. Sample missions might include micro-local POI or address collection, first connector roads between mapped but isolated towns in poorly-covered countries, and regional drives to improve particular tag coverage. Tagging rules in these cases would be positive, e.g. "tag every intersection that has a traffic signal with highway=traffic_signals" instead of "don't use horse=yes where you should use highway=bridleway". Steve Coast has released a few interesting micro-editing applications in this vein through his role at Microsoft mostly around U.S. address data.

This all raises the question of who has the right to define missions, who adds them to the homepage, and generally how we can approach the issue of the homepage as a communicative tool for the Foundation.

-mike.

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michal migurski- mike at stamen.com
                 415.558.1610