[OSM-talk] Portal for users/casual mappers (Re: Tagging FOR the renderer)

[Daniel Koć]

W dniu 18.05.2015 12:19, moltonel 3x Combo napisał(a):

> As nice as it'd be, http://osm.org/ is not trying to be
> http://maps.google.com/. It's not trying to be the One True Map Portal
> that caters to every needs.

I totally agree with you that One True Map Portal - in its full meaning 
- would be wrong. But it's a straw man argument, because that is plain 
impossible: our data and tools are distributed, mirrored and available 
on free licenses, so if you have some skills and the need for it, you 
can always make More True Map Portal =} (and you may even take over the 
old one, as with LibreOffice taking over OpenOffice.org)! With Google 
Maps it's not the option, of course.

You and I may not like the Google way, but they are not totally wrong 
either. The key idea is "integration". We don't need to put everything 
in one place to collaborate efficiently, but currently we are very 
disconnected as a project, so we really have no reason to be scared by 
the other extreme.

For programmers APIs, standard k/v database form or Git repositories are 
the glue; for contributors it may be OSM Wiki, iD, JOSM, lists and 
forums; but what about the people doing the most of the work - average 
mappers? Their "glue" for maps is some kind of portal and currently the 
only portal with some degree of integration for end users/casual mappers 
is our main website. They can:
1) find some names there (Nominatim or GeoNames),
2) browse the maps (5 "layers" to choose - however the name "layer" is 
wrong, because they are rather "skins" or "styles" for showing the data 
visually, and real layers would be nice to see one day!),
3) look at the data directly ("?" button),
4) leave some notes,
5) share the link to a place,
6) export the data from current view,
7) search route for car, bicycle or foot (using 2 different services for 
each of them)
8) look at the latest changes
9) ...and even edit the map without leaving the portal (iD or Potlatch)!

That is nice set of features, yet it does not look overloaded - does it? 
I think uMap would be another great tool enhancing the portal for the 
users. But at the same time things like 6) or 8) are less useful for 
them and maybe they belong to the other, "developers/advanced mappers 
portal"?

> Some reasons off the top of my head, some strong and some weak :
>  * The needs of contributors and users can easily conflict, and
> priority is/should be given to the contributors.

OK, what are their needs then and what kind of conflict you envision 
with uMaps?

We don't know too much about real casual mappers (that's why I suggested 
making a survey/research), because they are rather plain users 
scratching their own, small itch, than advanced contributors, who are 
more like developers in turn. And most of them will never look for any 
kind of contact with the core community (BTW: it took me a few years to 
get involved, because I made a lot of simple edits and needed no 
assistance). But some of them will and they will become advanced 
contributors in the end.

>  * Even without conflicts, the size of the contributor-focused todo
> list means that enduser-focused features get constantly pushed back.
> Help welcome.

Some of you may already know it from WeeklyOSM or the discussion on the 
Tagging list, but for the rest let me briefly quote the abstract of the 
scientific article called "Characterizing the Heterogeneity of the 
OpenStreetMap Data and Community":

"All three aspects (users, elements, and contributions) demonstrate 
striking power laws or heavy-tailed distributions. The heavy-tailed 
distributions imply that there are far more small elements than large 
ones, far more inactive users than active ones, and far more lightly 
edited elements than heavy-edited ones. Furthermore, about 500 users in 
the core group of the OSM are highly networked in terms of 
collaboration."

[ http://www.mdpi.com/2220-9964/4/2/535 ]

The most of the work in OSM is done not by the few hundreds of advanced 
users, but by much more casual mappers. So I think we should care much 
more for their work, no matter how basic it is, because if we have more 
simple users generally happy with the OSM services, we will get much 
more (small) contributions than we can ever have dealing only with core 
contributors. We just don't think of them as contributors, because we 
don't see them, but in reality they are very long kind of "tail" - 
wagging the dog probably! ;-)

I like many tools for advanced mappers, but constant pushing back end 
user needs is like having great engine only the educated engineers can 
use. The users are our ecosystem too, and the article says they are very 
powerful small-scale engineers (DIY, bricoleur) army.

>  * Becoming the internet's one-stop map website would require huge
> server ressources. Getting the kind of money required to run them
> would require huge changes to the way OSM is run, which'd be dangerous
> for OSM's freedom.

Not necessarily! We may cooperate with other projects and act as the hub 
for their services, but ultimately we may also start using people 
computing resources, as we were in Tiles w home. Distributed computing 
framework like BOINC is already available today, but I think we may make 
it even more lightweight (Docker instead of full VM when possible), 
distributed (like P2P layer for sharing tiles) and mainstream in the 
future. Do we at least play with such things?

>  * Similarly for manpower requirements; volunteers wouldn't be enough 
> anymore.

Free culture history has already showed us that if you make casual 
contributors life easy, more of them will become advanced contributors. 
Now we're too much Nupedia-like, because we tend to focus on "experts". 
Probably nobody (including creators =} ) ever thought the layman 
spin-off (namely Wikipedia) could do any better than Nupedia, let alone 
start being "The Encyclopedia" we know today! And its not even the 
closed chapter - it still grows...

>  * A healthy ecosystem of commercial users is important for OSM. And
> they should be able to do a better job of serving the end-user, so
> it's probably a bad idea to compete with their use-case.

So is for Google... =} It also sounds like "let's drop making Linux 
distributions like Debian or CentOS, because it may damage Canonical or 
Red Hat commercial interests!".

-- 
"The train is always on time / The trick is to be ready to put your bags 
down" [A. Cohen]