Thank you all for your replies - It is good to see people giving this issue some thought. I also see that the project ideas page has been updated which is excellent!
There are some interesting suggestions in the above emails. I'll try to summarise where we are - please correct me if I am wrong. 1. A number of suggestions for additional features for JOSM. (A more visual object history presentation, reversion of specific objects to previous versions and a 'Mapping Anomalies' detection feature). I don't see anyone disagreeing with these ideas, so I will add a 'JOSM Improvements' idea to the wiki and include a pointer back to this thread. 2. A suggestion that the 'newbie editor' proposal should be removed in favour of encouraging students to contribute to existing editors, which are maintained actively. I agree that we should encourage participation in existing projects - please suggest ideas!, but I think that a very simple editor could be achieved as a GSoC project given the very limited scope. It is very true though that what is on the wiki is nowhere near a project specification - I was kind of hoping that the proponents of the idea would pad it out for me! 3. Split some of the more ambitious ideas into manageable tasks - I am all for that! I think that I may be viewing this list slightly differently to some others - I see it as 'ideas' from which potential students can construct a 'proposal', taking account of the time available etc. I see thinking through the proposal to decide what is achievable as an important part of the up-front consideration for the student - They will probably need some steers from people on this list to help them decide on that [see below]. 4. A more 'project management' oriented project where there may be more time spent specifying than coding. We would need to check the rules carefully, but I think you can demonstrate quite easily that for User Interface based projects, the planning, discussing, agreeing part is more important than the coding - putting together a UI is not that hard - putting one together that the average casual user finds intuitive is difficult, so well worth the planning time. 5. An interesting suggestion to improve the 'History' list, which would also help the rendering process - I liked the sound of this as this is one of the few suggestions for projects involving the 'core' of OSM. The reply suggested that this was already being worked on - is the solution actually progressing, or would it be useful to see if a student was interested in looking at it? It is an opportunity to nurture someone to understand the innards of OSM? 6. A suggestion for testing an alternative web based map viewer (presumably against OpenLayers?). This is an interesting idea, but I am struggling to turn it into a 'code' project - or is the 'code' part of it the development of the test suite to fire requests to the different viewer applications? So, thank you all for your efforts - please keep thinking to see if you can come up with anything else, especially in the 'core' parts of OSM. On this I did just try to look for the API 0.7 feature list, but can't find it - is anyone thinking about what the next version of the API will do, or do we think we are about there, and we are actually using 1.0? If there are features to add, then these could be potential projects? A final point (plea?) - I would like to encourage potential students to seek the views of more experienced contributors on their ideas using these lists, as you will be able to make a better judgement of the amount of effort required to do something than they will - please bear this in mind if you see queries from new people, and be constructive in your replies! Thanks Graham. -- Graham Jones Hartlepool, UK email: grahamjones...@gmail.com
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