Creating Community
The ideas expressed in this page have largely been implemented in the current version of the site.
Gatherings of OpenStreetMap users - for events such as the Isle of Wight workshop and Mapchester (see Mapping weekends) - have enabled people to get together to work on specific areas. These events can be very useful to gather a large amount of data in a short amount of time whilst also producing much needed publicity for the project.
Perhaps key to this though is the social network leveraged to enable this to happen. The events have helped the community to get to know one another better and work with each other in building the OSM database for these areas. These are just two of the millions of places worldwide that could be mapped though. Support for the project has to be drummed up elsewhere, and the more people that get involved, the better. However, it is much better if each person working on a particular area can be in contact with others around to make sure that work is not duplicated and to improve efficiency.
Currently there are a number of Wiki Project pages in the wiki that people can look for to find people to collaborate with, there's a mailing list which people can use too, but there is nothing within the main site that allows people to see who else is editing around them, who is uploading tracks to the area, and so on. The addition of the traces page has helped produce a bit more of a community effect - think the Flickr of maps - of being able to see what people are uploading and for which areas, but it's only a start.
There should, in my opinion, be more of a community around the mapping that we all do. I'd like to start putting together a list of Ideas and requirements for improving the user community aspect of OpenStreetMap, hopefully to help people discover people around them, communicate and collaborate.
Please help build the list with any requirements that you see as being useful.
Contents |
Requirements
General
- Ability to opt-in/-out of the community - allow people to map anonymously if they wish
- Single place to edit personal information
- Display name
- User preferences
User Information pages (profiles)
A personal presence for other users to see
- Public profile for user (like the wiki user page)
- Free text
- Traces from the user
- Areas of interest
- Names, Map snapshots, Links to map
- Contact information
Areas of Interest/Activity
This would be a relatively well structured section of the site that listed all of the places/areas that people were working on mapping
- Hierachical organisation of areas of interest (world -> continent -> country -> city etc)
- Easy search
- Places by proximity
- to user (based on their profile information)
- to other places
- Graphical views (maplets) to show how much work has been put into an area already
- List users mapping the area
Mapping
- When looking at an area, it should show people who are mapping the area with links to their profiles
--Dankarran 23:46, 22 May 2006 (UTC)
