Hi, On Sun, Sep 9, 2012 at 2:39 AM, Steve Bennett <[email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, Aug 29, 2012 at 7:55 AM, Dan Dascalescu > <[email protected]> wrote: >> What do people think of moving this OSM help to the Stackexchange community. >> I think that benefits would be tremendous, better marketing, possible new >> users would see this great project and all other positive things that could >> help boost this osm community. (Note that logging in with StackExchange's >> OpenID URL works, but that won't bring any of these benefits). > > Agreed. I think the negative comments below are somewhat symptomatic > of how isolated the OSM community can be: rather than seeing an > opportunity to recruit new members and connect with other communities, > people are focusing on a pretty minor inconvenience: the need to > possibly acquire a new username/password. Many (most?) people have a > Google account these days - if anything, we should be moving in that > direction, not trying to hold onto our own private auth universe. > > (I can't really speak for the overall value of moving to SE. For a > long time I actually thought that help.osm site *was* on SE - the > branding was so similar.) >
Help.osm.org uses the open sourced variant of the same software that runs the StackExchange suite of sites, OSQA. That would account for the very similar user experience. I do not see too many benefits for a dedicated OSM community on StackExchange. I use various StackExchange web sites, ranging from English (I hope that pays off) to GIS. I don't see too much overlap between the different SE sites, they pretty much coexist independently in their separate subdomains. Your karma - or whatever it is called - also does not roll over to other SE sites (that's probably a good idea). The only possible benefit I see is the single sign-on which would make it easier for existing SE users to engage with the OSM community. But as help.osm.org already supports most of the authentication methods SE supports - OpenID, Google, Yahoo and a slew of others - that benefit is really, really small. On the downside, the site would have to go through the SE vetting process, which would take up time and energy. I would like to hear more about these perceived benefits of better marketing and attracting new users. Is there an example of a pre-existing domain-specific help platform that moved to SE and benefited 'tremendously' from that? As for authentication: I don't buy the 'That would make me sign up to a new thing and I would need to remember another password' argument and in general I strongly support integrating OSM authentication with existing authentication domains. -- martijn van exel http://oegeo.wordpress.com _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
