[OSM-talk] Shoud OSM Help move to Stackexchange community?

Martijn van Exel m at rtijn.org
Sun Sep 9 16:33:41 BST 2012


Hi,

On Sun, Sep 9, 2012 at 2:39 AM, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 29, 2012 at 7:55 AM, Dan Dascalescu
> <ddascalescu+OSMtalk at gmail.com> wrote:
>> What do people think of moving this OSM help to the Stackexchange community.
>> I think that benefits would be tremendous, better marketing, possible new
>> users would see this great project and all other positive things that could
>> help boost this osm community. (Note that logging in with StackExchange's
>> OpenID URL works, but that won't bring any of these benefits).
>
> Agreed. I think the negative comments below are somewhat symptomatic
> of how isolated the OSM community can be: rather than seeing an
> opportunity to recruit new members and connect with other communities,
> people are focusing on a pretty minor inconvenience: the need to
> possibly acquire a new username/password. Many (most?) people have a
> Google account these days - if anything, we should be moving in that
> direction, not trying to hold onto our own private auth universe.
>
> (I can't really speak for the overall value of moving to SE. For a
> long time I actually thought that help.osm site *was* on SE - the
> branding was so similar.)
>

Help.osm.org uses the open sourced variant of the same software that
runs the StackExchange suite of sites, OSQA. That would account for
the very similar user experience.

I do not see too many benefits for a dedicated OSM community on
StackExchange. I use various StackExchange web sites, ranging from
English (I hope that pays off) to GIS. I don't see too much overlap
between the different SE sites, they pretty much coexist independently
in their separate subdomains. Your karma - or whatever it is called -
also does not roll over to other SE sites (that's probably a good
idea). The only possible benefit I see is the single sign-on which
would make it easier for existing SE users to engage with the OSM
community. But as help.osm.org already supports most of the
authentication methods SE supports - OpenID, Google, Yahoo and a slew
of others - that benefit is really, really small. On the downside, the
site would have to go through the SE vetting process, which would take
up time and energy.

I would like to hear more about these perceived benefits of better
marketing and attracting new users. Is there an example of a
pre-existing domain-specific help  platform that moved to SE and
benefited 'tremendously' from that?

As for authentication: I don't buy the 'That would make me sign up to
a new thing and I would need to remember another password' argument
and in general I strongly support integrating OSM authentication with
existing authentication domains.
-- 
martijn van exel
http://oegeo.wordpress.com



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