Well, I'm a very new OSMer, but I'm starting to have opinions already. I wanted to put together a decent local map and googled until I stumbled on OSM. It fitted my needs, I liked the idea of adding to something public and so I jumped in.
I guess the trickiest thing for a newcomer is the absence of a "dummies guide" - there's lots of content on the wiki and elsewhere, but you do sort of need to know what questions to ask before you get anywhere. The documentation on Potlatch is more accessible than josm, although I found myself using josm more. User docs for software is one thing I do for a living, so this is something I hope to contribute to in due course, but at present I'm still learning the nuts and bolts. One of the scariest things I found was that it is possible to seriously stuff up the map by doing something innocent. Perhaps a top 10 things NOT to do might be a useful guideline. Every question I've asked so far on the forums and elsewhere has been dealt with courteously, but I have seen some abruptness. There should be no such thing as a stupid question on a newbie forum. One thing which still baffles me is that there are a number of different ways to accomplish many tasks, and you can often find a description of what those ways are, but there's not a lot which says "this is the best way if you want to achieve such-and-such a rendered effect". Trial and error does work, but I wonder how often the wheel is being reinvented - and whether the consistency of the map is suffering. Regards Phil On 5 Oct 2009, at 04:18, Richard Weait <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi newbies list, > > Are you new to OpenStreetMap? Here are some questions as conversation > starters. All are optional. > > 1. What first brought your attention to OSM? A magazine article? A > web site interview? SteveC's FLOSS Weekly interview? > > 2. What made you decide to get involved and join this list? > > 3. What is the trickiest part about starting with OSM, for you? Can > you suggest how to make this tricky thing less-tricky? > > Or, of course, feel free to post your questions about beginning to > contribute data to OpenStreetMap. > > _______________________________________________ > newbies mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/newbies _______________________________________________ newbies mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/newbies
