[OSM-talk] twitter handling

SteveC steve at asklater.com
Thu Sep 8 18:35:59 BST 2011


On 9/8/2011 11:30 AM, Frederik Ramm wrote:
> 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.

I suppose it's a sign of the project's maturity that we discuss rather 
than solve problems.

Steve



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