[OSM-talk] OpenStreetMap Future Look

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 01/08/2013 12:02 PM, Paweł Paprota wrote:
> Providing a modern, well-integrated and usable main website for OSM
> is a great challenge I would like to take part in. If you don't think
> this is a good goal for the community then that's fine, after all
> it's an open community so everyone can work on what they want to.

Definitely! Many of the best things in OSM on which we now rely
heavily - including Mapnik which renders our maps, Osmosis which is the
foundation for all our data replication server and client side, or
various editors - have been started by individuals who did this because
they, like you, had fun in doing it. Even essential parts of today's
data model have been developed in that fashion ("Look, I built something
cool, what do you think about it?").

That is exactly the approach that I would recommend if someone were to 
ask me how to "move forward" - have a small discussion if you want but 
essentially, just build the damn thing, or at least a prototype for 
people to play with, and get people interested.

It often takes longer than expected; I remember approaching Dennis, the 
man behind OSRM, about three years ago, asking him if he saw any options 
to make their university routing engine usable for OSM. A lot has 
happened since then and I'm convinced we'll have some sort of routing on 
openstreetmap.org in due course but I wouldn't have thought that it 
would take so long. Dennis has meanwhile chosen to showcase their 
algorithm on a server of their own at project-osrm.org but that's not a 
bad thing; they received a lot of valuable feedback and were able to 
improve their engine and by the time we'll run it on osm.org it will be 
relatively mature.

Building stuff on your own gives you the freedom to go down whatever 
path you want, and if you build good stuff then it will eventually come 
closer to the OSM core, and possible even be added to the central web 
site. But even without being run and operated by OSMF, stuff can be 
tightly integrated - think the OpenCycleMap which is directly accessible 
from our main page, or think TagInfo which is tightly integrated with 
the Wiki, both on platforms that operate separately. I'd also love to 
integrate some of the (proto)social features that Pascal has built - the 
heatmaps and the "contributors in your vicinity" maps. After these 
things have existed for a while and when the community has found them 
usable, why not approach the makers and talk about integration with our 
main site while still having things separately operated? The model 
certainly doesn't work for everything but I think an "ecosystem" is more 
than just coders working on the rails port.

That also helps to keep complexity down.

Bye
Frederik

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