[OSM-talk] Activity Stream (a.k.a. "social" OSM) - demo instance

[Paweł Paprota]

> IMHO the separate tabs on osm.org are a little bit fuzzy in their 
> concept, yet.
> We have tabs for search, data details, map key, export and your proposed 
> activities.
> The Tab concept as it's used currently lacks combination possibilities: 
> It's not possible to show any combination of tabs, which would be useful 
> especially for the activity stuff.
> I personally don't want to actively crawl the activity, but have it at 
> hand while using osm.org as a mapper; keep it open and see what happend 
> while diving into a data detail with the data tab or exporting an image.
> 
> But as long as there's nothing changed in what we have now, well... it's 
> one simple and fitting possibility, that doesn't harm the current page ;)
> (to make that clear: the feature itself is cool, that doesn't harm, I'm 
> talking about the implentation as tab here only).

This kind of feedback is exactly what I'm looking for at this stage. I
wanted to have activity stream for displayed bounding box so I used the
simplest possible implementation (technically speaking) - a new tab. But
I agree that it is a bit awkward in terms of user experience.

The problem is that I'm a developer... I'm sure I can come up with some
kind of UX design for this but there are people who would do this much
better and in shorter time... it would be great to have someone look at
this and just point out obvious problems like you did.

I think that the "activity on the main page" feature could be used to
nicely show off OSM's core philosophy - that the map is actively built
by people. A newcomer will likely immediately go to their own home area
with the map and if they see that there are other mappers nearby this
could further motivate them to join OSM.

Right now I'm not sure how to implement it better in terms of UX... As I
said this is pre-pre-alpha so there's a lot of other stuff to work on
but at some point UX will start to matter as much as anything else... so
suggestions/ideas/mockups/whatever welcome.

> > * Do you think commenting on activities would be a useful feature?
> For blog posts I think we have that already, which raises the question 
> if that should be something on the activity stream or on the activity 
> itself at source side.

Yeah that is confusing, I guess the "comment" link could go to diary
entry in this case...

> You proposed yet
> - diary entries: these have comments already. I think, it should be 
> possible to show them, probably to add them, but comments should be 
> attatched to the blog, not to the activity server here.

+1

> - new mappers in your area: commenting? I would like to see a link to 
> send them a osm message instead.
> - OSM Tasking Manager: not sure, don't know much about it.
> - events: shouldn't comments go to the wiki page etc. where they are 
> pulled from?
> - help.osm.org: a link to provide that help would be better (again 
> direct at the help system)
> - ponies: no comment (please ;) )
> 

These are good points. The idea for comments is that it is a very easy
way to communicate. I think it definitely makes sense for changesets
because there is no other way to communicate with people on changeset
level other than sending a private message which is more work than just
clicking "comment" and typing something.

But for other activities as you point out this may not be so useful.
Thanks for your comments on this (pun intended ha ha).

Paweł