osm-planning
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osmlab
Groups on osm.org
The ability to create groups of users on osm.org and interact with them.
A group might be made up of a hand picked list of people who have a shared mapping interest or goal, defined by geography (a local group), or some other means.
Each group would have its own page for managing it, messaging.
Why groups?
- It is impossible, but sometimes highly desirable, to reach multiple mappers at once with a message.
- Organizing meet-ups and local activities is now frequently done using proprietary / paid platforms such as meetup.com, while osm.org would make sense as a platform for this kind of activity.
- Having groups on osm.org would emphasize the social aspect of OSM, which is currently hard to discover.
I worked on this with (iirc) @drewda and @mikelmaron back at the post SOTM hack day in SF (2013!) but activity on it fell flat. I think the branch we worked on may have been deleted?
https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/pull/297. Looks like @bhousel deleted the branch ;), but it can be recovered and there is some code in the crowdcover fork.
Would need a fresh look anyhow, since a lot of dependent code has changed.
Also want to think a bit on the concept. This was an interesting thread on the groups work https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/lxbarth/diary/20060. I was arguing a lot with @lxbarth back then, but I think me in 2018 agrees more with him than 2013 me. Revamped notifications, robust methods to follow individuals and areas would get a lot of the way there. Expand diary entry functions so you can filter by location, and add a date field to enable event posting. I think this would result in a lot of social features in OSM, without going the route of groups.
I'm working on a feature like this. I'm currently building it as a separate website, but it's in rails with the idea that, one day, it may be rolled into OSM. So far my groups, codename microcosms, can have members, organizers, events, links to their facebook and twitter page, and it uses OSM for authentication.
I think we're at least partly on the same page @mikelmaron. 'Groups' doesn't have to mean a defined space that people join, it can simply manifest itself as a group of filters on OSM content (diaries, changesets + comments, new users, perhaps external feeds for meetups) that you can 'follow' and invite others to follow as well. I would like to see this as part of OSM.org, but I am curious to try out your thing as well @openbrian
This "groups" feature has been on my mind a lot lately, since directed editing is a thing that people are doing and where we could really benefit from attaching users to groups for transparency reasons - see https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/issues/1822
Maybe we can ship something less ambitious? I think of them like "organizations" on GitHub or "teams" on Transifex. Maybe we can limit scope:
- keep: group pages (logo, description)
- keep: show group memberships on user pages
- maybe: group messaging
- defer: filters on osm content (diaries, changesets)
It sounds like some of the more interesting openstreetmap-website projects might be blocked on switching authentication to use the Devise gem so I've asked if that is something that @gravitystorm wants help with..
As mentioned by Andy "groups" is a term that has a history in OSM, which is what this is about, instead of openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website#1822 which is about something new.
The latter half of my recent blog post is also relevant here. My personal belief is that things like groups (or organisations or teams) will be much easier to implement after certain other improvements have been committed first (including Devise and CanCanCan, but also things like more use of resourceful routing). I'm open to persuasion if anyone thinks it's not the best approach though.
I'd certainly appreciate any amount of help available on any of these topics!
