Agree with everything you said about *why* groups are important, except that: now that it's 2015, Facebook groups is really a better place for this.
> On Oct 15, 2015, at 3:43 AM, Richard Fairhurst <[email protected]> wrote: > > Paul Norman wrote: >> The problem is that if you make a discussion group too small, it >> doesn't have enough activity to sustain interest in it. >> >> Larger regions might work, but even a statewide group abandons >> the might meet for a geobeer idea where it takes 6 hours to drive >> across the state. >> >> Unfortunately, I don't have any great ideas. > > Groups on osm.org. > > Mailing lists only appeal to a certain subset of people. They look geeky, > they require yet another login/subscription, and we all get too much email > anyway. They're good for engaging the kind of people who like mailing lists, > but these days that doesn't include a lot of tech-savvy people. > > The idea behind having groups on osm.org is to encourage self-organising > communities, whether by region or topic. You don't have the hassle of > finding out who the OSM lists administrator is, emailing them, convincing > other people to join, etc. etc. You just go to osm.org and start a group. If > it doesn't work because the area is too small/too big, no problem, you try > another one. > > Users can join groups, and then when they post diary entries, can optionally > tag them as belonging to the Oxfordshire group or the cycle-mapping group or > whatever - and there you go, that's a discussion facility. Groups have > bounding boxes which enables the site to suggest that people might want to > join the group in the area they edit (maybe even on sign-up). So it's not a > big change, but it makes much better use of the existing social > functionality on osm.org (diary, home location, etc.) than we're already > doing. > > We got some way with implementing it but the effort stalled; I got stuck > trying to figure out how pagination works on osm.org! But I would love to > see coding resume on it and will happily take part if it's not just me > working solo. > > http://groups.apis.dev.openstreetmap.org/diary > http://groups.apis.dev.openstreetmap.org/groups/4 > https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/pull/297 > > cheers > Richard > > > > > -- > View this message in context: > http://gis.19327.n5.nabble.com/Increasing-the-number-of-US-Mappers-tp5857059p5857085.html > Sent from the USA mailing list archive at Nabble.com. > > _______________________________________________ > Talk-us mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us _______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
