Re: [OSM-dev] Student Project Ideas?
On 01/-10/-28163 08:59 PM, Ian Dees wrote: ... I think a more useful criticism would include some specific ideas... Well, if we are throwing around random ideas, I might as well chime in too... To state it upfront, I am not involved in any of the parts suggested, so I can neither fully judge the scope nor offer mentoring, but in case some one else finds the suggestions reasonable, they might make them into proper proposals. 1) Integrate a continuous integration framework into JOSM and write the appropriate unit and integration tests. JOSM seems to have a fair number of people contributing to its code base, which is great, but also potentially increases the likelihood of bugs, if people with less experience of the full code base contribute. So a good set of automatic tests, could help ensure JOSM doesn't break too often and hopefully attract even more developers, if, thanks to tests, one doesn't always have to fear breaking some remote part due to dependencies one didn't know about. The scope write unit tests... is fairly flexible and thus should be possible to make it appropriate for a 3 month student project. Also it probably can be considered sufficiently as coding to still qualify. It might not be the most exiting project ever, but I could imagine it being very useful to OSM and given the student is paid for it through Google, it might still attract someone. But people involved in writing JOSM would have to see if it is actually useful or just a stupid idea. 2) Optimize one of the existing routing engines to be a good quality assurance tool of suitability of OSM data for routing. Again, I am not entirely sure what exists already, but I don't think any of the routers (YOURS/gosmore, OpenRouteService, Cloudmade, pgrouting,...) work off of the minutely diffs yet. For quality assurance, a short turn around between trying to fix a bug and verifying that it has indeed been fixed is quite important. So getting down the update frequencies to ideally minutely diffs but perhaps at least hourly or daily would be very useful. If at the same time it is scalable enough to offer it to a large number of editors as a webservice (by e.g. using a better algorithm than the standard A* search), it could be a useful tool to help getting OSMs routability up to par. I can't really judge the scope of such a project, but again it feels like it probably should be possible to adjust the requirements to make it a feasible 3 month project. As said, it is just throwing in some ideas. But given that GSoC is probably the closest to if only code would magically appear we will get, I hope those suggestions don't harm anyone ;-) Kai ... ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
[OSM-dev] Student Project Ideas?
Hi Folks, We have submitted an application for OSM to participate in this year's Google Summer of Code, so next week the people from Google will be reviewing the application and our project ideas list to chose which organisations to include in the programme. Looking at the project ideas list ( http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/GSoC_Project_Ideas_2010) I am a bit surprised that there are no suggestions for student projects on the 'core' OSM databases. The things I wondered are: - Are there any areas for development of API version 0.7 that could be turned into a project for someone to work on? - Would it be worth working on the XAPI server? We had trouble last year with them being down, so I wondered if it would be worth developing a more 'conventional' postgresql version of the server that we could start-up easily if the others fail again? I started to look at this at the time, but didn't get far because I got tied up in regular expressions rather than writing a parser myself. - Without wanting to re-open the acrimonious debate again, could we turn development of the OSM web site into a project? (would have to check the GSoC rules for this, because there might not be much 'code' involved). - How about the main editors - JOSM and Potlatch - are there any potential projects there? Please give this a bit of thought, and add any ideas to the Wiki page! If you don't have chance to do that, an email to me will do and I will add it. Thanks Graham. -- Graham Jones Hartlepool, UK email: grahamjones...@gmail.com ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
Re: [OSM-dev] Student Project Ideas?
On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 08:52, Graham Jones grahamjones...@googlemail.com wrote: Please give this a bit of thought, and add any ideas to the Wiki page! If you don't have chance to do that, an email to me will do and I will add it. Here's my idea: Can we please not make things like Develop a Simple, Stand-Alone Editor for New Users part of the GSOC list. I've seen numerous failed and dead-on-arrival GSOC projects with various projects that usually turned out that way because inexperienced students were being handed projects that were too ambitious and even if they were finished saw decay because nobody else was interested in maintaining them. I think it would be most useful to have students contribute to existing projects that need help such as JOSM, Potlatch, the rails port or something similar. ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
Re: [OSM-dev] Student Project Ideas?
On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 10:21 AM, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason ava...@gmail.comwrote: On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 08:52, Graham Jones grahamjones...@googlemail.com wrote: Please give this a bit of thought, and add any ideas to the Wiki page! If you don't have chance to do that, an email to me will do and I will add it. Here's my idea: Can we please not make things like Develop a Simple, Stand-Alone Editor for New Users part of the GSOC list. I've seen numerous failed and dead-on-arrival GSOC projects with various projects that usually turned out that way because inexperienced students were being handed projects that were too ambitious and even if they were finished saw decay because nobody else was interested in maintaining them. I think a more useful criticism would include some specific ideas... I agree that Simple Editor for New Users is way too nebulous and should probably not be handed to a student. But perhaps someone has some ideas on how to break up such an idea into more manageable chunks of work that we could hand to students. For example, one of the requirements in the simple editor that I've been sketching in my doodle-notebook is to have an extremely fast nearest way lookup. I imagine something like that could be written, documented, and demonstrated in one Summer. How about we ask a student to conduct a UX review (sit down with random people and have them interact with OSM and observe) and write a report? ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
Re: [OSM-dev] Student Project Ideas?
On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 10:50 AM, Tom Hughes t...@compton.nu wrote: On 10/03/10 16:31, Ian Dees wrote: For example, one of the requirements in the simple editor that I've been sketching in my doodle-notebook is to have an extremely fast nearest way lookup. I imagine something like that could be written, documented, and demonstrated in one Summer. We've had lots of projects in previous years that were written, documented and demonstrated. Then they sat in svn slowly rotting for evermore... I'm not quite sure what you're actually suggesting here - if you're talking about a new API call for the rails port to return the nearest way to a point then that is certainly not a big enough project to be GSOC worthy - it's little more than a few hours work. The point I was trying to make was to break down big projects into smaller more manageable pieces and to bring those up as suggestions rather than saying something like let's not do GSoC because we only have ideas for huge projects. ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
Re: [OSM-dev] Student Project Ideas?
Hi, Tom Hughes wrote: I'm not quite sure what you're actually suggesting here - if you're talking about a new API call for the rails port to return the nearest way to a point then that is certainly not a big enough project to be GSOC worthy - it's little more than a few hours work. One of the features (or maybe problems?) of GSoC is that it tends to bring people to OSM who have no prior OSM experience. If you come to OSM from the outside, getting to the point where you can add an API call within a few hours might well take one summer ;-) Bye Frederik ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
Re: [OSM-dev] Student Project Ideas?
I've got an idea for a project - but I've no idea if it's do-able in the scope of GSoC. Basically: fix the History tab on the main slippy map. Currently, if you hit that button you get a list of (what appears to be) every edit-session whose bounding-box contains the bounding-box of the current slippy-map view. This is 99% useless! Currently the list that you'll get given will contain all the edits to the coastline of the continent containing your view, also all robot-edits that affected the whole database (since they effectively have a bounding-box of the whole world). What you need is to generate a dirty-tiles list for every edit-session in the database and only display the edit-sessions whose dirty-tiles list includes tiles that you're looking at with slippy-map at that time. Obviously, this is a crude description of a solution - many optimisations would be needed if it was to be implemented for real. Does that sound worthy? Steve ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
Re: [OSM-dev] Student Project Ideas?
On 10/03/10 17:30, Steve Hosgood wrote: What you need is to generate a dirty-tiles list for every edit-session in the database and only display the edit-sessions whose dirty-tiles list includes tiles that you're looking at with slippy-map at that time. Obviously, this is a crude description of a solution - many optimisations would be needed if it was to be implemented for real. Does that sound worthy? Yes, which is why somebody is already working on it. Tom -- Tom Hughes (t...@compton.nu) http://compton.nu/ ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
Re: [OSM-dev] Student Project Ideas?
What you need is to generate a dirty-tiles list for every edit-session in the database and only display the edit-sessions whose dirty-tiles list includes tiles that you're looking at with slippy-map at that time. Such a dirty-tiles list could be used in tile-expiring on the render servers as well. The current solutions to this have the same problem as the history tab: a change to the german border triggers the whole german country to be marked as dirty, because they're inside of the relations. Such an algorithem would be very useful on all rendering stacks -- and it's also a not so easy task (because of various reasons that don't need to be mentioned here ;) Peter ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
Re: [OSM-dev] Student Project Ideas?
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 ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
Re: [OSM-dev] Student Project Ideas?
On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 16:31, Ian Dees ian.d...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 10:21 AM, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason ava...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 08:52, Graham Jones grahamjones...@googlemail.com wrote: Please give this a bit of thought, and add any ideas to the Wiki page! If you don't have chance to do that, an email to me will do and I will add it. Here's my idea: Can we please not make things like Develop a Simple, Stand-Alone Editor for New Users part of the GSOC list. I've seen numerous failed and dead-on-arrival GSOC projects with various projects that usually turned out that way because inexperienced students were being handed projects that were too ambitious and even if they were finished saw decay because nobody else was interested in maintaining them. I think a more useful criticism would include some specific ideas... You mean specific GSOC ideas? We'll probably have plenty of those. What I was pointing out that just because something would be neat to do that doesn't mean that it's appropriate for being handed to a student for 3 months. Once you have those ideas how are you gong to pick one? I for one think: * You should try to make students work on existing /active/ projects instead of sending them off on their own for 3 months * In particular, assume that they'll be working for 3 months and we'll never hear from them again. I think there are some numbers on the % of GSOC students that stay around after the 3 months and IIRC they're alarmingly low * Try to recruit people with programming experience who're already contributing to the project in interesting ways that happen to be students (and no, I'm not eligible). This will reduce load on mentors * Don't underestimate the load on mentors. I've heard from people that did mentoring (albeit for complex projects) that spent more time on mentoring than it would have taken them to implement the student work themselves, and the student disappeared after 3 months so there was no long-term gain from it. ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
Re: [OSM-dev] Student Project Ideas?
On 10/03/10 21:14, Graham Jones wrote: 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? The backend technology exists and is running on the dev server - it is what drives the dupe nodes map. Work on user interfaces is ongoing. 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? It's in the wiki somewhere but I don't think there's anything very useful or helpful there. Tom -- Tom Hughes (t...@compton.nu) http://compton.nu/ ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
Re: [OSM-dev] Student Project Ideas?
On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 3:19 PM, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason ava...@gmail.comwrote: Once you have those ideas how are you gong to pick one? I for one think: * You should try to make students work on existing /active/ projects instead of sending them off on their own for 3 months Yes, that's why we are soliciting ideas for projects. Some of these projects could include a feature on JOSM or Potlatch. * In particular, assume that they'll be working for 3 months and we'll never hear from them again. I think there are some numbers on the % of GSOC students that stay around after the 3 months and IIRC they're alarmingly low Of the 6 students that were assigned to us last year, I'm fairly certain (I was the administrator for last year's GSoC, but I don't have the numbers in front of me) the majority of them turned in usable and helpful code. ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
Re: [OSM-dev] Student Project Ideas?
On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 3:27 PM, Tom Hughes t...@compton.nu wrote: On 10/03/10 21:14, Graham Jones wrote: 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? It's in the wiki somewhere but I don't think there's anything very useful or helpful there. http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/API_v0.7 http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/API_v0.7As Tom said, it's full of ideas :). ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
Re: [OSM-dev] Student Project Ideas?
Aevar, The process is that we (OpenStreetMap) produce a list of ideas that students may wish to work on. If the students like the sound of us they will make an application describing a project proposal. Google will (assuming we are successful) allocate us a number of student places - we had 6 last year. The potential mentors will review all of the applications and agree which ones to select - this choice will be based on the quality of the application, but will of course be influenced by the interests of the potential mentors. Once we know that we have been accepted I will be contacting the potential mentors to agree how we will do this. I completely agree that it would be best to encourage students to work on existing active projects, but to do that we need to help them identify aspects of those programs that would benefit from development, so that they can be turned into specific projects - this is why I am keen for people to identify potential improvements to existing programs! It is quite possible that a student will work on GSoC and then go off and do something else, but this is not necessarily the case - one of last year's students is helping with the administration this year. Your point on mentoring effort is interesting - I acted as a mentor last year and fully expected it to be hard work, like training one of our new graduates at work how to write a computer program, which would have been very daunting by email in a foreign language. The complete opposite was the case - the student was very capable and my mentoring did not have to go much further than pointers on the general approach and code design - he did all of the testing to chose methods of parsing, data storage etc. himself. The other thing is what you think mentoring is about - I regard it as a way of contributing by passing my experience onto someone else, so even if you do not hear from the student after the end of the project, you should not regard that as 'no long-term gain' - they will be using that extra experience for something constructive. Regards Graham. You mean specific GSOC ideas? We'll probably have plenty of those. What I was pointing out that just because something would be neat to do that doesn't mean that it's appropriate for being handed to a student for 3 months. Once you have those ideas how are you gong to pick one? I for one think: * You should try to make students work on existing /active/ projects instead of sending them off on their own for 3 months * In particular, assume that they'll be working for 3 months and we'll never hear from them again. I think there are some numbers on the % of GSOC students that stay around after the 3 months and IIRC they're alarmingly low * Try to recruit people with programming experience who're already contributing to the project in interesting ways that happen to be students (and no, I'm not eligible). This will reduce load on mentors * Don't underestimate the load on mentors. I've heard from people that did mentoring (albeit for complex projects) that spent more time on mentoring than it would have taken them to implement the student work themselves, and the student disappeared after 3 months so there was no long-term gain from it. -- Dr. Graham Jones Hartlepool, UK email: grahamjones...@gmail.com ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
Re: [OSM-dev] Student Project Ideas?
Ian, Tom, Thanks for the pointer - I had naively thought it would be linked from the 'API' page and didn't think to search! Would anyone have an issue with me adding the link so I can find it again? It is an interesting list of possibilities isn't it - would anyone that knows more about it than me fancy identifying the likely candidates on the ideas page in case one of the students would like to look at implementing them? Thanks Graham On 10 March 2010 21:35, Ian Dees ian.d...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 3:27 PM, Tom Hughes t...@compton.nu wrote: On 10/03/10 21:14, Graham Jones wrote: 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? It's in the wiki somewhere but I don't think there's anything very useful or helpful there. http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/API_v0.7 http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/API_v0.7As Tom said, it's full of ideas :). -- Dr. Graham Jones Hartlepool, UK email: grahamjones...@gmail.com ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
Re: [OSM-dev] Student Project Ideas?
On 10/03/10 21:53, Graham Jones wrote: Thanks for the pointer - I had naively thought it would be linked from the 'API' page and didn't think to search! Maybe if anybody involved with coding the API was taking it seriously then it would be... Would anyone have an issue with me adding the link so I can find it again? So long as you make it clear that it's nothing more than a wish list of vague ideas, most of which are not serious and/or practical. It is an interesting list of possibilities isn't it - would anyone that knows more about it than me fancy identifying the likely candidates on the ideas page in case one of the students would like to look at implementing them? Pretty much everything either makes little sense or needs considerable discussion and design before it could be implemented - there's nothing much that is suitable for an OSM novice to go off and implement on their own. Tom -- Tom Hughes (t...@compton.nu) http://compton.nu/ ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
