[OSM-talk] Upgraded map controls

[Simon Poole]

Am 21.07.2013 20:18, schrieb Michal Migurski:
> Supporting official venues for orderly change is what the board should
> be doing, but is not. I would support the creation and use of a
> proposal/vote/implementation process for the community, even if the
> first proposal is just "be it resolved that Mapbox accepts
> responsibility for the visual design of OSM.org". 

I would find it very very difficult to subject superficial design
changes to a popular vote, these are matters of personal taste and work
flow and it is very unlikely that we could reach any kind of consensus
within a reasonable time frame, wit this thread. What would be nice if
we could get to a state where changing the visual appearance of the main
site would not be such a heavy weight task (at least not for the devs)
and could happen substantially more often than once in a decade.

> The new icons and map controls are good and I'm getting accustomed to them, but the process by which they made it onto the site worries me. Mostly, it's because Saman opened his SotM-US talk with a "blow it all up" slide and finished with gamification that I'm uneasy with how we're treating the visual presentation of OSM.org. Gamification is a sad, sorry sideshow and we shouldn't do it; it only became a meme because Zynga made a zillion dollars and look how that turned out. Do we plan to follow through on gamifying the OSM UI as Saman suggested in his talk? I don't know, and I don't want to have to subscribe to Github pull requests to find out.
Now high level goals and to a certain point functionality is something
that, IMHO, is worth discussing with a large group, and we have ongoing
discussions that cover exactly such territory. Besides what has been
written here, there is a larger one on the German list about the
potential gamification of OSM which shows that such a step is not simply
a design question and definitely needs more community consensus if it
should be seriously considered for implementation.
 
Simon