[OSM-talk] Simple improvement(s) to openstreetmap.org

Frederik Ramm frederik at remote.org
Wed Jan 9 14:57:50 GMT 2013


Hi,

    I share Tobias' and Jean-Marc's dislike of centralized and 
proprietary social networks and I don't think we should offer free 
advertising for them (even if that is commonplace nowadays).

Like Tobias said, many other things are "commonplace" (like contributing 
to Google Map Maker and therefore allowing your work to be assimilated 
by a non-open system) and we argue against them, so it is only fitting 
if we spend more thought on this than the average web site operator.

Pawel has a point though when he says

> Simple question then: you go to osm.org and want to find out what's new
> in the project. How do you do that? Where do you find project
> announcements like the recent 1 million users news?

I think it is ok for us to post stuff to Twitter, and I think we should 
make room for such news on our web page (many web sites have a widget 
that shows the most recent twitter mentions).

I would dislike a "follow us on Twitter" button because it will only 
show the Twitter signup page if someone doesn't have an account, and 
therefore make it look like you had to subscribe to Twitter in order to 
read our news - which is thankfully not true.

Having said all that, I don't have the time or passion to fight this 
point in CWG, and I trust CWG enough to believe they're not a troupe of 
Facebook fanboys. They know that endorsing proprietary "silo" sites 
doesn't harmonize with our other messages, and if they choose to add 
such endorsement to our web site nonetheless, it will be because they 
have reason to believe that the net effect is still positive.

Anyone who wants to do something about that would have to join CWG and 
do his share of the job.

Bye
Frederik

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



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