Re: [OSM-dev] finding OSM users by their home locations
On May 31, 2009, at 3:50 PM, Paul Johnson wrote: Matt Amos wrote: in my opinion it's evil to contact users who haven't opted in to be contacted. it's a valid point of view that they implicitly opted in, but i don't think this is what most users intended when they added a home location - it's certainly not what i intended. I'm not sure it's a valid point of view beyond the current assumption: You want to hear from other OSM users trying to contact you, without necessarily revealing contact information. It's generally OK to assume people want to hear from other humans, but not OK to assume they want automated or bulk messages without them opting in first. I think trying to push beyond that might result in folks reporting OSM messages as spam, which is an annoying and sometimes expensive problem to fix. Err on the conservative side of sending things en masse or automatically unless it's been specifically requested. On the other hand, OSM is a community and it's fair to contact OSM users about OSM events. So, what I've been doing to err on the conservative side, as Paul suggests, is to send email only to people who have 1) edited near 2) their home as they've marked it in OSM. The intersection of 1) editors near the party and 2) home users near the party is about 1/8th as large as the union. I think that's reasonably conservative. Unless we have a consensus for me to stop, I will continue this practice and help my fellow ambassies (it's a new word. If nobody ever makes up new words, and we keep wearing out the old ones, we'll end up just grunting at each other) use it too. It will result in less email sent, so is an overall decrease in any evil as Matt describes it. -- Russ Nelson - http://community.cloudmade.com/blog - http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:RussNelson r...@cloudmade.com - Twitter: Russ_OSM - http://openstreetmap.org/user/RussNelson ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
Re: [OSM-dev] finding OSM users by their home locations
On Sun, May 31, 2009 at 01:41:39AM -0400, Russ Nelson wrote: The OSM webserver will tell you the ten people with home locations closest to your home location. It would be useful to be able to get more than that, for the purpose of inviting people to attend mapping parties so they can become more effective and enthusiastic OSM contributors. If you move your home location to the location of the mapping party, you can get ten people, and if you move it around some more, you can get more than just those ten. So, being intolerant of boring, repetitive activities, I've written a program to find OSM users by their home location. You give it a lat,lon, and the radius in degrees of the circle in which you want to find people, and it repeatedly changes your home location until it's gotten everyone. Is this program a good thing or a bad thing? If it's a good thing, then great, I'll use it. If it's a bad thing, then how do we stop other people less cooperative than myself from writing the same program? There are two issues here: First, the issue of server overload etc. This could be solved simply by creating regular dumps of users with their home locations. Kind of like the planet dumps. Its easier for users of the data and easier on the database. The other issue is privacy. Yes, people have willingly added a home location, but it is different if you get bulk access to this. I don't see this as a big issue considering that the home location is voluntary and that much more information about users is available from the main body of data itself, namely not only a home location but all the places they have ever edited data. But some people may not like this. And while we are on the topic: I think home location is a bit limiting. How about giving users the option to add an (unlimited) number of locations, maybe not as a point but as a bounding box and tag them. And make it explicit that this information is public. Users can use this to mark their home (location=home) or workplace (location=work). Or they can express an interest in some area (interest=changes). Applications external to the core can read this information and do things with it, such as producing personalized feeds of changes. Jochen -- Jochen Topf joc...@remote.org http://www.remote.org/jochen/ +49-721-388298 ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
Re: [OSM-dev] finding OSM users by their home locations
Hello, I guess it all depends on whether the users have accepted to make public their location. I am not sure whether the site allows to decide whether to make public or not your location. Personally, while I understand your enthusiasm, I would find annoying to receive a pre-formatted message asking me to do more for Open Street Map. I am more than happy to help people in the same area as me, and I actually did contact someone editing my hometown for that very purpose. But I would get twitchy if it was done a mass scale. This is a hobby project for me and I would consider your practice to be a bit like bullying. But that's just me. However, it varies from people to people and if they choose to make their location public I see no reason not to send them an email. I just wouldn't like it. The key thing is that you have to be careful about privacy in this case. Emilie Laffray Russ Nelson wrote: The OSM webserver will tell you the ten people with home locations closest to your home location. It would be useful to be able to get more than that, for the purpose of inviting people to attend mapping parties so they can become more effective and enthusiastic OSM contributors. If you move your home location to the location of the mapping party, you can get ten people, and if you move it around some more, you can get more than just those ten. So, being intolerant of boring, repetitive activities, I've written a program to find OSM users by their home location. You give it a lat,lon, and the radius in degrees of the circle in which you want to find people, and it repeatedly changes your home location until it's gotten everyone. Is this program a good thing or a bad thing? If it's a good thing, then great, I'll use it. If it's a bad thing, then how do we stop other people less cooperative than myself from writing the same program? -- Russ Nelson - http://community.cloudmade.com/blog - http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:RussNelson r...@cloudmade.com - Twitter: Russ_OSM - http://openstreetmap.org/user/RussNelson ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
Re: [OSM-dev] finding OSM users by their home locations
Russ Nelson wrote: So, being intolerant of boring, repetitive activities, I've written a program to find OSM users by their home location. You give it a lat,lon, and the radius in degrees of the circle in which you want to find people, and it repeatedly changes your home location until it's gotten everyone. I had heard rumours that such a program existed... Is this program a good thing or a bad thing? If it's a good thing, then great, I'll use it. If it's a bad thing, then how do we stop other people less cooperative than myself from writing the same program? Well it's certainly bad from a technological point of view, and from the point of view of the stress it potentially places on the site. The correct way to solve the problem is to enhance the facilities the site offers for visualising mappers locations. We may also of course want to strengthen the privacy controls we offer users at the same time. Tom -- Tom Hughes (t...@compton.nu) http://www.compton.nu/ ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
Re: [OSM-dev] finding OSM users by their home locations
Emilie Laffray wrote: I guess it all depends on whether the users have accepted to make public their location. I am not sure whether the site allows to decide whether to make public or not your location. Well first of all we don't require anybody to give their location at all, though some people might want to (as it becomes their default map view when logged in) but not make it public. Secondly, if it is set then only people that have made their data public are visible, but of course all new members get that state automatically and can't change it. Plus anybody wanting to edit the map now needs to make their edits public. However, it varies from people to people and if they choose to make their location public I see no reason not to send them an email. I just wouldn't like it. The key thing is that you have to be careful about privacy in this case. I would suggest that we (a) add a new reveal my location preference and then (b) add better features for browsing a map with users who have chosen to reveal their location marked. Tom -- Tom Hughes (t...@compton.nu) http://www.compton.nu/ ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
Re: [OSM-dev] finding OSM users by their home locations
How about a set of contact preferences? It would be easy to say allow other OSMers to contact me for mapping parties etc. Perhaps for old users this could be set to on by default, but we send them a little message so that they can change it straight away if they want to. Something like the ITOWorld OSM Mapper would be great on the site (or at least linked to), so that people can see activity in their areas of interest http://www.itoworld.com/static/osmmapper - Original Message From: Emilie Laffray emilie.laff...@gmail.com To: Russ Nelson r...@cloudmade.com Cc: dev@openstreetmap.org Sent: Sunday, 31 May, 2009 9:26:02 Subject: Re: [OSM-dev] finding OSM users by their home locations Hello, I guess it all depends on whether the users have accepted to make public their location. I am not sure whether the site allows to decide whether to make public or not your location. Personally, while I understand your enthusiasm, I would find annoying to receive a pre-formatted message asking me to do more for Open Street Map. I am more than happy to help people in the same area as me, and I actually did contact someone editing my hometown for that very purpose. But I would get twitchy if it was done a mass scale. This is a hobby project for me and I would consider your practice to be a bit like bullying. But that's just me. However, it varies from people to people and if they choose to make their location public I see no reason not to send them an email. I just wouldn't like it. The key thing is that you have to be careful about privacy in this case. Emilie Laffray Russ Nelson wrote: The OSM webserver will tell you the ten people with home locations closest to your home location. It would be useful to be able to get more than that, for the purpose of inviting people to attend mapping parties so they can become more effective and enthusiastic OSM contributors. If you move your home location to the location of the mapping party, you can get ten people, and if you move it around some more, you can get more than just those ten. So, being intolerant of boring, repetitive activities, I've written a program to find OSM users by their home location. You give it a lat,lon, and the radius in degrees of the circle in which you want to find people, and it repeatedly changes your home location until it's gotten everyone. Is this program a good thing or a bad thing? If it's a good thing, then great, I'll use it. If it's a bad thing, then how do we stop other people less cooperative than myself from writing the same program? -- Russ Nelson - http://community.cloudmade.com/blog - http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:RussNelson r...@cloudmade.com - Twitter: Russ_OSM - http://openstreetmap.org/user/RussNelson ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
Re: [OSM-dev] finding OSM users by their home locations
Joe Richards wrote: How about a set of contact preferences? It would be easy to say allow other OSMers to contact me for mapping parties etc. Perhaps for old users this could be set to on by default, but we send them a little message so that they can change it straight away if they want to. That's basically unenforceable though - we have no way of knowing what a message is about when somebody sends it. Tom -- Tom Hughes (t...@compton.nu) http://www.compton.nu/ ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
Re: [OSM-dev] finding OSM users by their home locations
Russ Nelson wrote: The OSM webserver will tell you the ten people with home locations closest to your home location. It would be useful to be able to get Ticket #1425 requested to return more than 10 nearby mappers too. http://trac.openstreetmap.org/ticket/1425 -- Lennard ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
Re: [OSM-dev] finding OSM users by their home locations
On Sun, May 31, 2009 at 11:41 AM, Tom Hughes t...@compton.nu wrote: Joe Richards wrote: How about a set of contact preferences? It would be easy to say allow other OSMers to contact me for mapping parties etc. Perhaps for old users this could be set to on by default, but we send them a little message so that they can change it straight away if they want to. That's basically unenforceable though - we have no way of knowing what a message is about when somebody sends it. if we want to keep the map on the users' pages showing the nearest other users to them, we might as well offer this data publicly. as russ said, it's one script and a bunch of server load away from being public anyway. in my opinion it's evil to contact users who haven't opted in to be contacted. it's a valid point of view that they implicitly opted in, but i don't think this is what most users intended when they added a home location - it's certainly not what i intended. i like jochen's idea of being able to additionally put in a bbox (or maybe several) that are areas of interest - please contact me about OSM activities in this area. we could then make the users' home locations private, but show a map of which users are interested in areas near your home location. of course, a simple notify me about OSM activites in my area checkbox could make it very easy to create a bbox centred on your home location. this could also start allowing 3rd party sites to easily offer a follow changes in my areas of interest feature, which has been often requested. cheers, matt ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
Re: [OSM-dev] finding OSM users by their home locations
On May 31, 2009, at 7:00 AM, Matt Amos wrote: if we want to keep the map on the users' pages showing the nearest other users to them, we might as well offer this data publicly. as russ said, it's one script and a bunch of server load away from being public anyway. Right. If we want to protect people's privacy, then we should change the map on the users' pages. We shouldn't claim to protect people's privacy and then do so ineffectually. in my opinion it's evil to contact users who haven't opted in to be contacted. it's a valid point of view that they implicitly opted in, but i don't think this is what most users intended when they added a home location - it's certainly not what i intended. By this principle, nobody -- not any individual editor, not the OSMF -- can send email to any user. And yet, OSM has an email system, and people are encouraged to use it to ask users about their edits. i like jochen's idea of being able to additionally put in a bbox (or maybe several) that are areas of interest - please contact me about OSM activities in this area. we could then make the users' home locations private, +1 And then create a way to Send an email to a location which gets archived so that people who come along later can see earlier messages posted to that location. If we could get those bounding boxes (to protect privacy, without usernames), that could also let us find the places in which nobody (or few people) are interested. If there are holes in the interest level, then the map isn't going to be very good in those locations. -- Russ Nelson - http://community.cloudmade.com/blog - http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:RussNelson r...@cloudmade.com - Twitter: Russ_OSM - http://openstreetmap.org/user/RussNelson ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
Re: [OSM-dev] finding OSM users by their home locations
On Sun, May 31, 2009 at 1:46 PM, Russ Nelson r...@cloudmade.com wrote: On May 31, 2009, at 7:00 AM, Matt Amos wrote: if we want to keep the map on the users' pages showing the nearest other users to them, we might as well offer this data publicly. as russ said, it's one script and a bunch of server load away from being public anyway. Right. If we want to protect people's privacy, then we should change the map on the users' pages. We shouldn't claim to protect people's privacy and then do so ineffectually. +1 - it probably doesn't matter so much in urban areas, where the inaccuracy of the home location is much greater than the distance between houses. in rural areas it's more of an issue... in my opinion it's evil to contact users who haven't opted in to be contacted. it's a valid point of view that they implicitly opted in, but i don't think this is what most users intended when they added a home location - it's certainly not what i intended. By this principle, nobody -- not any individual editor, not the OSMF -- can send email to any user. And yet, OSM has an email system, and people are encouraged to use it to ask users about their edits. sorry - i should have restricted my statement to unsolicited mass mails (i.e: spam) by other users. clearly the OSMF needs to be able to contact users in an official capacity (e.g: questionable edits, license changes, etc...), and OSM users may want to directly contact eachother to resolve similar issues on a less official level. it's difficult to enforce technically, but, in my opinion, we should be strongly discouraging mass sending of unsolicited messages. And then create a way to Send an email to a location which gets archived so that people who come along later can see earlier messages posted to that location. this is an interesting idea - what would you use it for? there's been lots of talk in the past about incorporating OSB into the main OSM site, which would have a similar set of features. If we could get those bounding boxes (to protect privacy, without usernames), that could also let us find the places in which nobody (or few people) are interested. If there are holes in the interest level, then the map isn't going to be very good in those locations. even with usernames - i think it's acceptable to say that a declaration of interest in an area is public knowledge. a map overlay shading by username would be very interesting/pretty/useful (delete as appropriate). cheers, matt ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
Re: [OSM-dev] finding OSM users by their home locations
On 31 May 2009, at 06:41, Russ Nelson wrote: The OSM webserver will tell you the ten people with home locations closest to your home location. It would be useful to be able to get more than that, for the purpose of inviting people to attend mapping parties so they can become more effective and enthusiastic OSM contributors. If you move your home location to the location of the mapping party, you can get ten people, and if you move it around some more, you can get more than just those ten. Sounds evil... but less evil than your current method of spamming everyone who has edited something nearby. -- Chris Jones, SUCS Admin http://sucs.org ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
Re: [OSM-dev] finding OSM users by their home locations
Tom Hughes schrieb: I would suggest that we (a) add a new reveal my location preference and then (b) add better features for browsing a map with users who have chosen to reveal their location marked +1 A better tool would be very fine. As the 10 persons are bit very much - especially in larger cities like Munich and under concern of the increasing number of people involved in OSM/mapping. Very welcome would be a map based tool to see who is mapping in a certain area. You can achieve this by changing your location. But this trick is not the best way IMHO. Best regards, Michael. ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
Re: [OSM-dev] finding OSM users by their home locations
Matt Amos wrote: On Sun, May 31, 2009 at 1:46 PM, Russ Nelson r...@cloudmade.com wrote: On May 31, 2009, at 7:00 AM, Matt Amos wrote: if we want to keep the map on the users' pages showing the nearest other users to them, we might as well offer this data publicly. as russ said, it's one script and a bunch of server load away from being public anyway. Right. If we want to protect people's privacy, then we should change the map on the users' pages. We shouldn't claim to protect people's privacy and then do so ineffectually. +1 - it probably doesn't matter so much in urban areas, where the inaccuracy of the home location is much greater than the distance between houses. in rural areas it's more of an issue... Well, my neighborhood happens to be surprisingly well mapped for TIGER, about the only obstacle for someone finding me is that it doesn't include elevation data, and I live in a nonoplex (think duplex, but 9 instead of 2). signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
Re: [OSM-dev] finding OSM users by their home locations
Tom Hughes wrote: Emilie Laffray wrote: I guess it all depends on whether the users have accepted to make public their location. I am not sure whether the site allows to decide whether to make public or not your location. Well first of all we don't require anybody to give their location at all, though some people might want to (as it becomes their default map view when logged in) but not make it public. This feature alone makes me wish there was a remember me checkbox, since my laptop's always with me and nobody else uses it. I would suggest that we (a) add a new reveal my location preference and then (b) add better features for browsing a map with users who have chosen to reveal their location marked. I'm in favor. signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
Re: [OSM-dev] finding OSM users by their home locations
Matt Amos wrote: in my opinion it's evil to contact users who haven't opted in to be contacted. it's a valid point of view that they implicitly opted in, but i don't think this is what most users intended when they added a home location - it's certainly not what i intended. I'm not sure it's a valid point of view beyond the current assumption: You want to hear from other OSM users trying to contact you, without necessarily revealing contact information. It's generally OK to assume people want to hear from other humans, but not OK to assume they want automated or bulk messages without them opting in first. I think trying to push beyond that might result in folks reporting OSM messages as spam, which is an annoying and sometimes expensive problem to fix. Err on the conservative side of sending things en masse or automatically unless it's been specifically requested. signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
[OSM-dev] finding OSM users by their home locations
The OSM webserver will tell you the ten people with home locations closest to your home location. It would be useful to be able to get more than that, for the purpose of inviting people to attend mapping parties so they can become more effective and enthusiastic OSM contributors. If you move your home location to the location of the mapping party, you can get ten people, and if you move it around some more, you can get more than just those ten. So, being intolerant of boring, repetitive activities, I've written a program to find OSM users by their home location. You give it a lat,lon, and the radius in degrees of the circle in which you want to find people, and it repeatedly changes your home location until it's gotten everyone. Is this program a good thing or a bad thing? If it's a good thing, then great, I'll use it. If it's a bad thing, then how do we stop other people less cooperative than myself from writing the same program? -- Russ Nelson - http://community.cloudmade.com/blog - http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:RussNelson r...@cloudmade.com - Twitter: Russ_OSM - http://openstreetmap.org/user/RussNelson ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
