[OSM-talk] Building a free/open reviews community w/ OSM support

[Erik Moeller]

Hi all,

I'm working on this project:

https://lib.reviews/

The front page explains the goal: to build a free, open and non-profit
community focused on reviews. Review content is under CC-BY-SA while
the codebase is under CC-0.

Basic functionality to write reviews is there (we identify things to
review by URL for now), but there's a lot more to come. See the
screencast on the front page for what is working so far. Language is a
first-class citizen: both the UI _and_ all content (including review
texts) are fully translatable. The site should be mobile-friendly, and
work without JavaScript.

I've long been involved with Wikimedia and am also a big fan of OSM;
these projects are guiding me in terms of the philosophy and
principles behind lib.reviews. See https://lib.reviews/terms which
should give some insight into the project philosophy.

I've noticed that having reviews associated with OSM data has been
proposed before, e.g. [1], and so I am hoping that OSM and lib.reviews
can become good friends :). The OSM POI data seems like a good way to
bootstrap reviews of restaurants, businesses, and the like. If anyone
wants to already get involved in investigating how this could be made
to work, I'd be more than happy to schedule a video call to walk you
through the codebase and architecture.

I'm also happy to answer questions on-list or off-list, and if you'd
like an invite-code to play with the functionality that's there so
far, shoot me an offlist note or follow the instructions on the site.
I believe free/open reviews are a critical component of the free
culture ecosystem, alongside maps, encyclopedic content, and other
information. If you agree, hope you'll check it out!

Warmly,

Erik

[1] http://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=27837