Hi qeef, just in case … do you know https://mappingnorthkorea.com/map / https://github.com/MRVDH/mapping-north-korea which is also a kind of Tasking Manager Tool, but just for north korea.

Also a quick feedback: Personally, I am not a fan of the name. It sound negative, which is a bad starting point for something good IMO :-)

Best, Tobias

Thanks @mmd. The quick-edit-fork-and-PR-flow is really awesome and easy and I was surprised to see it’s a feature since 2011 https://github.blog/2011-04-26-forking-with-the-edit-button/ (but was improved a lot since those screenshots).

@mvexel Thanks for this discussion, tool and writeup. I wonder if we are getting at this from the wrong side.

OSM already has plenty of tooling to ask for feedback by the local community. But we have next to no tooling to trigger notifications for those questions. As a result, most of the existing feedback goes unanswered.

Some examples:

Notes on the map

I write a note on the map somewhere. Right now no one will notice except by accident or some power user who actively look for it. So ATM, my node will likely be un answered for ages if ever.

What is missing? Notifications. Mappers that know the area where I placed the node should get a notification and be able to react to it.

There are several ways to solve this – one idea is below.

Fixme keys and changeset comments and changeset-review-requested-keys.

Same as notes above. I can write them, but no one will notice. We need tooling to get people to notice. Or to make it easier for people to discover them.

So instead of looking for a way to contact “nearby mapper”, why not look for a way to make it easier for mappers to see what is discussed nearby?

Contacting nearby mapper has two disadvantages: It’s only 1on1. Or, if you add groups, it’s another layer of communication; which OSM already has too many of (telegram, mail, forum, changesets, nodes, 1on1).

Related: I wrote about this as a proposal for a GSOC project. The idea is buried in the changelog ATM, so I will copy it here for reference:

Subscribe to changes for a region I know well

Summary: Wikipedia has a simple but powerfull tool to increase the quality of a page: Whenever I edit it, I can also subscribe to changes. This way I can contribute to the quality of the article over time. It also helps against bad edits. (More https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilfe:Beobachtungsliste). — OSM does not have a well integrated solution for this usecase. Ideally, this tool where integrated tightly with the OSM website and iD Editor to allow a one click subscription to changes in the current region. The tool would send emails with a helpful summary of the change and encourage nice replies to changes (positive or contructive). The tool will continues to send emails until the user stops reacting to the emails (same as Wikipedia).

Notes: Related: The closes that OSM has to solve this, is OSMCha: You can create a filter for a region and subscribe it via RSS. However, both steps are quite complicated. And also, the RSS view and mobile view of OSMCha in general do not help a lot when reviewing those changes while on the go. See https://github.com/mapbox/osmcha-frontend/issues/345 for more.

@acsd I just came across this commercial curb project and though it has similarities to your great micro editor. So FYI some links: - https://coord.co/curbs - https://coord.co/explorer/sf#37.79330700003739,-122.40008303292501@16 - https://medium.com/coord/behind-the-curbs-building-the-curb-map-883bab281feb

Thank you for sharing all this details. I found it very nice to read - especially with all those good illustrations/examples. This looks like a great process and great contribution to me.

This comic sums it up pretty nicely: https://xkcd.com/927/

IMO, the OSM community has more important projects that are closer to its core then replacing Github …