[OSM-talk] Looking Forward

[Serge Wroclawski]

On Sat, Dec 24, 2011 at 8:02 AM, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:
> Fellow OSMers,
> 
>   I'd like to use the calm end-of-year season to say a few things I
> consider important, hoping that I might get a few people to spend a
> thought or two on them.

Here's my top issues I'd love to see resolved. Some of these I'm even
working on (though not as much as I'd like to).

1. A more split-database

I'd love to see a completely shardable solution one day, but if we
took some small steps today with the database, we could get really
far. Spitting out just a few tables would improve our main areas of
contention, thereby increasing speed. And that would already handle
some of the "sharding" type issues w/o needing a major technology
change.

2. A cachable API

We have some technical solutions caching tiles, but the API is largely
not cachable. There are some modest changes (I'm writing up a
proposal, and there are others) that would make the API cachable. A
cacheable API might be a nice step in the direction of a distributed
database w/o needing to refactor major parts of the infrastructure.

3. More communication inside OSM

We've had proposal and sample code for changeset comments/voting. I
think this kind of thing is really important as the project grows.

4. More focused activity at OSM events

PyCon has a full week of developer sprints. It uses the money from the
conference to pay for cheaper facilities (often in the same hotel) for
developers to work on various projects.

I think OSMF could do the same, with either developer or other focused
events at SOTM. Examples would be working on the rails port, on new
API features, but also new tilesets, or something else that simply
needs a bunch of people and time.

4. More direction from OSMF

I'd love to see OSMF do more projects like the design contest. I don't
like how the design contest went about being set up, but I like the
sentiment and want to see more of OSMF taking a stewardship role,
providing direction.

5. Support for geographic data other than GPX tracks.

We support GPX tracks. I'd love if OSM could also support usage of
other resources, be them shapefiles that are cleared or geotagged
images.


But hey that's just me, but it all seems entirely reasonable for 2012. :)

- Serge