[OSM-talk] OSM Stats site kickstarter

[Steve Coast]

The technical work to open source it is not huge (which is part of the reason why it’s only a $1k kickstarter) but it involves cleaning up the code, moving the repo, clicking some buttons on GitHub. The work to fix the code and the hosting is where most of the cash goes.

The social work *to actually get it running* as an open project means finding developers, finding sysadmins and servers to do all the data processing (which isn’t trivial, there’s a fair chunk of processing there that happens every week) would mean far more time than the technical work. Note – I’m not proposing to do any of this if the kickstarter is successful. This is what you’d have to do if it *isn’t* successful. Since I don’t want to do this, I’ll just press delete.

I don’t really see the point of the former without the latter. If I can’t raise a tiny amount like $1k to do this, then that’s a clear indication that the universe doesn’t care, and it would also be unlikely for volunteers to magically do all this work.

To me, it’s really an experiment in micro-funding. There are lots of little projects that use OSM that are built and run by volunteers using free or cheap resources. And that’s great. Is there also space for tiny things to get funded enough? I don’t know, let’s see. Because if that space does exist then you maybe can do things like hire other skills (like interaction designers or whatever) to make the thing ten times better.

What I’d like to do is put all my work through kickstarter to either fund or kill the variety of little sites I have. It seems like an efficient way to do it, but maybe I’m wrong.

Best

Steve



On 4/12/17, 10:57 AM, "Hakuch" <hakuch at posteo.de> wrote:

    On 12.04.2017 18:45, Steve Coast wrote:
    > Ten years ago, I’d probably do the work for free to open it etc, but don’t have the time now.
    
    Just to understand: whats the problem/work of just opening it? Is it
    because of libs which are not open source? I just feel a little
    blackmailed at the moment and Iam interested to understand the
    circumstances.