On 15/10/2015 14:28, Bryan Housel wrote:
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.
Yeah... but no.
Every time this comes up, someone suggests "use my favoured platform".
Which might be Facebook, or it might be Google Groups, or Meetup, or
whatever.
Which is tempting, except these platforms have incredibly uneven
penetration both demographically and geographically. Chatting to three
friends in the pub last night (all older than me, none geeky, one even
of American birth) I was interested to find I was the only one on
Facebook, and even then I'm a pretty reluctant user.[1] The other three
had made a conscious decision to stay away.
You can _get_ people to OSM via Facebook; it's one of many good channels
for that. And you can use it to organise within a particular
demographic, particularly young and urban.
But it's not an answer to "how do we make mapping fun and 'sticky'?",
whereas groups on OSM can be. You can integrate OSM groups into the
discovery process - sign up, have groups suggested to you, get invites
from people who've seen your mapping - which you can't easily do with a
third-party solution, especially given the Facebook real name/OSM
username mismatch.
cheers
Richard
[1] Anecdata alert: if you extrapolate that 25% across the 3,000
population of Charlbury, it looks pretty sickly compared to the 2,400
registered users of the Charlbury website.
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