[OSM-talk] twitter handling

Frederik Ramm frederik at remote.org
Thu Sep 8 18:30:51 BST 2011


Hi,

On 09/08/2011 05:20 PM, SteveC wrote:
> * Chicken and egg. No OSM answers supplied today - so why would there be
> lots of questions?

+1 to Mikel: Let's answer questions by pointing people to our existing 
support infrastructure; not by trying to create another support 
infrastructure (one of the disadvantages of which is that after a few 
hours no second person will profit from the answer given because it is 
not archived).

To *encourage* people to use twitter as a support medium would be 
detrimental.

> Personally I want the OSM attitude to be "that's a fun idea, let's try
> it". This costs us basically nothing

You're free to answer tweets like anyone else is free to do, and indeed 
does already. That doesn't cost anything indeed. Setting up a project 
that bundles peoples' time by enticing them to take part in your fun 
idea will ONLY cost us nothing if these people were NOT using their time 
to help OSM before. If, on the other hand, by giving twitter users the 
impression that they will be personally cared for if they just shout out 
their problems, you create an atmosphere where experienced OSMers will 
spend much more time to personally tend to such questions (because 
participation is drawn away from media like help.osm.org where answers 
are archived and because new users are not encouraged to search for 
answers in these well-redacted media), then this does indeed lower the 
overall quality of service we can provide because our resources are limited.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"



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