[OSM-talk] Bringing new life to the OSM.org front page

[Johannes Kröger]

> Where would you
> stop if it was decided to post announcements to the community.

http://blog.openstreetmap.org/ would be the perfect news channel. It
allows passive and active participation without the need of
registering or installing specific software. You can point anyone at it
and they see a normal website. You can add it to your feed reader or
bookmarks and follow anything important going on.

It would just need to be linked to on the homepage.

As a user it is impossible to follow all the channels. If you decide to
follow everything you get overwhelmed by a lot of technical jargon you
don't understand, noise that you as "dumb user" don't need to
understand (bug reports/discussion for example) and lots of pointless
bikeshedding. And if you were still receptive, then you might still not
know what ends up being implemented.

Asking not to flood developers with negative comments (or any kind
really) is orthogonal with suggesting everyone to directly follow
development on github and -dev mailinglists!

I am with OSM for 5 years and I do not fully know who is responsible
for things, who has the final words on other things. I often see names
reappear here and there, and over time I got some ideas but it would be
really nice to just have an overview of the actual "executive" teams of
those parts of OSM that not everyone can edit.

Apart from the missing zoom bar and the non-descript icons I really
like the redesign so please don't get me wrong! But I have no idea
where, when and by whom it was decided to build/use it. Granted, I have
not watched the video from SOTMUS yet, maybe it is mentioned in it.
Maybe I overread it in the slides (with their obnoxiously huge text,
anti-readable on a monitor). Maybe it was suggested and planned a long
time ago and I just forgot about it.

The blog seems like the perfect place to be the main communication
channel to the community for those in charge.

Cheers, Hannes