Community Updates/2010-09-27
Community Update From 27 September 2010 to 03 October 2010
Image Of the Week
Building outlines in Staffanstorp, Sweden courtesy of the town council GIS.
Project of The Week
How about a nice drink of water? Refreshing on a warm day, especially nice when one has worked up a sweat by collecting information for OpenStreetMap.
News
OSM "Community Updates" Needs Your help!
Do you read this? Do you like this? Please help us do it better! OSM "Community Updates" needs help, especially reviewers, to be a better information channel.
There is a lot of different possible work. Just check the how to help page or directly correct this news!.
Think Before You Bot
Sometimes tags are deprecated or widely disapproved of, and yet still used numerous times. Some people have developed Bots to perform automated edits, thereby changing tags or adding fixme notes to objects or places. But these Bots can also be devastating or counter-productive. Someone reminded on the mailing list that Bot usage should be preceded by an agreement and should follow the Automated Edits/Code of Conduct.
RFC: Social Club
A new proposed feature has been made about Social Clubs. What are they? Social clubs are places where members can meet and socialise, and usually includes bars, restaurants and games. They differ from a pub or bar in that they are usually members-only establishments. Examples of social clubs include working men's clubs, gentlemen's clubs, ex-servicemen's clubs (e.g. the British Legion) and clubs based around a specific activity or sport (e.g. football supporters' clubs).
The proposal is to add a tag leisure=social_club.
Comments are open at: Talk:Proposed features/social_club
Controversial Ice Cream
Whilst being recently accepted as a tag, amenity=ice_cream is still very controversial. First, acceptance of the tag was by a slim majority (60% of voters); it also seems that most "approve" votes were made before the poll was announced on the list.
In addition to opposition to the tag in general, people also talk about problems with namespace (why amenity?), and failure to reuse existing tags (like amenity=cafe + cuisine=ice_cream). This conversation about ice cream has expanded to a discussion about reorganizing food-related tags as a class (ice_cream included).
Landuse reworking?
For some, landuse=* is quite a mess. There are different and unrelated things in it : reservoir, vineyard, farm ... So they put to the discussion a proposal to reorganize landuse following big themes (agricultural, residential, commercial,...).
Bridge And Historical Railways
This began with a proposal to re-organise brigde=* (e.g. removing bridge=abandoned). Quickly the discussion moved on to the use of railway=abandoned + highway=cycleway and globally about keeping historical data into OSM. "It will clutter the db" or "We should only tag what's currently there" were opposed to "it is legitimate & accurate." and "they are still frequently meaningful landmarks."
Vote: Social Facility
The Proposed features/social facility wants to add the tag amenity=social facility with another key to describe more the facility e.g. social_facility=shelter social_facility=food_bank. Votes are now open on the page.
RFC: Roundabout Priority
Another proposed feature want to add a roundabout=priority_to_right on roundabout that doesn't follow the rules of ordinary roundabout like this one . Other peoples seems to not agree with this propositions. There points are that the example is then not a roundabout, and should be tagged with another tag. Additionnaly, priority_to_right doens't fit well in country where we drive on the left side.
What's the point of Big import ?
Some people are concerned about the future of osm with big imports. First of all, imports are somewhat problematic with the change of licence. Then, a big import can "kill" a community: Mass of data is added without real help to maintain / correct it. Gradually, the community stops correcting and stops editing in openstreetmap. Others say that the amount of data that is needed to get new OSM editors / users and imports can bring information which cannot be collect on the ground easily.
Usability Testing
Nate Bolt is going to help OSM run usability tests and we need your help.
This week or next we're going to switch on some javascript on the OSM signup page that invites a percentage of signups to help OSM run a user survey. Those people fill out a form and are invited later to use some simple online screen capturing software while asked to do some simple tasks and this is where you come in.
Then on December 8th (tentative) at the Bolt|Peters office in San Francisco, OSMers together with the UX wizards will analyze the videos and make some joint suggestions on how to push things forward.