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

[Erik Moeller]

On Fri, Aug 5, 2016 at 7:48 PM, Pine W <wiki.pine at gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Pine,

Nice to run into you here!

> Hod do you plan to develop readership for this site? Yelp seems to have a
> commanding lead.

To begin with, I think the most important question is whether this is
something of importance to the free culture movement -- people like us
who care about works being free to share and build upon, without
control by any single organization, and with the technology being
re-usable by others along with the content.

I personally obviously think it's an important problem to work on --
user-created reviews are pervasive, important and typically
proprietary, along with the sites that host them. Moreover, there are
obvious conflicts of interest at play that can be mitigated through a
more open approach without a commercial motive by the site operator.
Finally, I hope that we can ultimately add useful metadata beyond just
"is this a good product", e.g., about  a company's environmental or
labor record.

If enough other people agree, then the answer to your question is not
what _I_ plan to do :). If we don't care about this problem as a
movement (which might legitimately be because other things are more
important), then it won't get solved.

With that preamble, I personally have a few thoughts on that, of
course. For now I'm building out core functionality; once that's done,
I want to look into meeting the needs of specialized communities that
aren't currently being well-served by commercial players. lib.reviews
already has the notion of teams:

https://lib.reviews/teams

If anyone reading this would like to start a team to review things
that already have a matching OSM community, for example, let me know
and we'll get that started. I also want to make reviews easily
embeddable, Disqus style, so that folks who run small web shops and
such can use our software with minimal effort.

There's more, but I don't want to take up too much space on the OSM
list with not obviously OSM-related aspects of the project, and invite
folks who want to brainstorm further about it in general to subscribe
to the lib.reviews list, here:

http://www.freelists.org/list/lib.reviews

Cheers,

Erik