Well let me take that back a bit - actually even doing some very simple cleanup
of the interface and having a feedback mechanism *at all* would be a good first
step, as people jumped on my recent OGD post in the comments:
http://opengeodata.org/the-importance-of-timing-to-feedback
On Jun 17, 2010, at 7:27 PM, SteveC wrote:
> I think you're concentrating on tiles, but that's not really the bottleneck I
> would jump on first.
>
> The conversation goes like this:
>
> "steve we have 300 million people a day look at our site and we would like to
> send their edits and feedback to OSM"
>
> Really it's the API we're talking about. Tiles are just a CDN problem.
>
>
> On Jun 17, 2010, at 7:18 PM, Frederik Ramm wrote:
>> Steve,
>>
>>> They would like to link to us directly but don't think a) we can
>>> handle the load and b) don't think it would be a good user experience
>>> to dump people on to osm.org, what with the site design.
>>
>> To paraphrase (not specifically Wolfram, but the unnamed other megacorps
>> you're chatting with):
>>
>> 1. they'd like to link to us directly but our infrastrucutre is too weak;
>>
>> 2. they would not want to give us a shitload of money to improve our
>> infrastructure, but could imagine hosting something;
>>
>> 3. there is fear that the community would view this negatively.
>>
>> To which I say, I don't think the community has anything against someone
>> doing a glorified maps.cloudmade.com; if they have really fast servers and
>> maybe even a CDN, can do lots of styles and make the tiles and services
>> available under a free-for-all policy. That would be great, and would - if
>> given sufficient long-term promise by whoever it is - allow us to reduce our
>> tile serving to an experimental capacity, freeing up resources for the core
>> database which obviously we must keep operating ourselves.
>>
>> But there is a logical problem here and that has nothing to do with us at
>> all. You say that many would like to link to OSM directly if only OSM had
>> sufficient resources. Now assume that some big guy with many enemies, say
>> Google, or Microsoft, were to offer super-fat tile serving for OSM as I
>> outlined above. We would then scale back our own tile ops to a minimum, and
>> their server would be the main OSM tile server, and whenever you go to
>> www.osm.org your browser says "connecting to osmtile.google.com" or some
>> such.
>>
>> I think that the community would be less of a problem - I don't think many
>> would care if our tiles came from MS or Google or so as long as they were
>> unrestricted and the data remained free. But all those other big guys, of
>> whom you say that they would like to link to us - would *they* want to send
>> their users to get tiles from Google, MS or someone else? Or would the "we'd
>> like to link to you but your infrastructure cannot take the load and anyway
>> your front page is ugly" then be replaced with "we'd like to link to you but
>> you must understand that the 'sponsored by XYZ' on the shiny front page is a
>> problem"?
>>
>> Of course things would be even worse if the big sponsor wanted to put the
>> tiles or service under a non-open license (e.g. a license with a
>> "noncommercial" component"). That, I think, would reduce overall usefulness
>> rather than improving it. Any funded tile serving would have to be more open
>> than what we can currently offer, not less.
>>
>> Bye
>> Frederik
>>
>> --
>> Frederik Ramm ## eMail frede...@remote.org ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33"
>>
>
> Steve
>
> stevecoast.com
>
Steve
stevecoast.com
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