It has been said that many people sign up to OSM because they believe
they'll have advanced user features (more maps? your own map style?
whatever). Without any research into this, you cannot conclude that
those who sign up would have been mappers if only our web interface
was more like Facebook.
Also, I think that your comparison with Facebook is totally out of
place; OSM is a site where you sign up if you want to survey the
planet, whereas Facebook is a site where you sign up if you want to
be in touch with your friends. OSM is a project where people work on
a common goal together; this is something completely different than
Facebook. If someone told me "I signed up to OSM but was so different
from Facebook that I couldn't do anything" they will probably get a
rather puzzled look from me!
I didn't mean Facebook literally, I just used it as an example of a
website that is from the 21st century.
I don't understand the obsession with wanting everything on "the main
page". We're not a business that needs the ad revenue; we're an open
project and one of the great things that we want people to
understand is how everyone can build cool stuff with OSM. What better
way than to link to stuff other people have built? (Kind of like the
"Schaufenster" on www.openstreetmap.de - I'd like to move the map
away from our "main page" like www.openstreetmap.de did.)
My vision goes beyond that (or maybe not beyond but in a different
direction...) as I believe that having a proper modern website that
shows off different tools (like routing) and most of all - user
contributions and data we have - will ultimately help the project at all
levels.
I really don't want to discuss whether OSM main website should
have feature X or Y. I am interested in doing X and Y, I know that
people are interested in X and Y and are going to find it useful.
So instead of endless discussion I will just do it because I am a
developer. In the process of doing it I suddenly realize that I
actually enjoy working on this stuff but it takes a lot of effort
so I ask around about funding because I would like to continue
working on it.
Makes sense. Much better than having a committee tell you what to
code next, no?
And no one is/was suggesting we have such committee.
The simple fact is that some of the improvements won't ever be
implemented without people working full time on it
I'm not sure if that is a simple fact. Nobody has ever (to my
knowledge) approached OSMF and said "I'll code feature #4 on your top
ten tasks list if you give me so-and-so much money". I don't know
what would happen if someone did. OSMF could either reject, or accept
and pay, or talk to other parties who might be interested in the
issue.
I have, by the way, done that myself, too, in the past; on several
occasions I was approached by someone who wanted additions coded for
JOSM or other OSM related tools and I built them and added them to
the code base. In at least one situation I had an idea myself and
approached a company working with OSM and asked if they'd be
interested in funding it. I've never asked for, or received money
directly from OSMF though.
I don't think you appreciate the complexity of the OSM main website and
related services. JOSM and standalone tools and scripts are just single
purpose tools which are rather easy to code (although of course require
a lot of effort). There are no user-driven scalability, point of
failure, hardware, security and integration challenges involved.
And that's why TTT list moves so slowly. Have you followed EWG
discussions about the main issues from that list? After attending
several IRC meetings and reading some logs it is clear to me that some
of those issues are fundamentally different from what you try to compare
it to above.
I also have done some OSM contracting work but compared to OSM main
website it was no challenge at all - no scale, only one country extract,
no history. Where's the engineering fun in that? Providing a modern,
well-integrated and usable main website for OSM is a great challenge I
would like to take part in. If you don't think this is a good goal for
the community then that's fine, after all it's an open community so
everyone can work on what they want to.
Paweł
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