Groups are a feature found in most modern online communities. Basically, they are a way for a collection of users to connect themselves over common attributes.
While they wouldn’t serve any purpose to the actual map/mapping itself, they could become a key feature in OSM communities. They could also be useful for things like Organised Editing Activities, friend groups, or organizations.
What would you all think of this?
I would think that you should inform yourself before asking for a feature that has been in development for quite a while now and hasn’t at all been secret.
I consider myself averagely informed and have not ever heard about the development of this feature, altough that is good to hear.
There have been multiple talks at SOTMs not to mention working group minutes, blog posts and so on.
See Communities rsvp by openbrian · Pull Request #3756 · openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website · GitHub for a relevant PR.
JFYI: Users of the forum here (myself included) do not necessarily read dozens of blog post, mailing lists, working group minutes, pull requests and the like.
Nevertheless it’s good to know that there is something in the pipeline.
Weekly OSM?
But that wasn’t the point in the 1st case. If you want to start a thread pressuring the website maintainers in to doing something, then the least you can do is to spend the couple minutes necessary to determine if it is already planned / in work.
Ok, I’ll take that. I myself did not understand this question
as an attempt to “pressure the website managers in to doing something” but I don’t want to argue about that. I like the idea and am looking forward to what may be coming up.
Calm down. It’s not like I haven’t done any research, altough, as you, the “most averagely” informed person should really know, the terminology I came up with and the actual one used in development differs, which lead to me finding nothing.
Furthermore, I am not trying to push anyone into anything, I was just trying to raise opinions for, if it was needed, the creation of an issue.
Really, you can count yourself lucky, as this kind of attitude it is, that scares off new contributors.
You are in no way a new contributor or even remotely a blank page. The “research” I was referring to could have easily been done with googling “groups on osm.org”.
Screenshot_20230508_100514_Google|44x500
Unfortunately, my phone can’t so langer screenshots. No related results for as far as I looked, though.
You are absolutely right, altough this rather speaks for me, showing, that even experienced contributors can’t really entirely wrap their heads around the split-up jungle that is the development and community of/about this plattform.
I clearly should have formulated that differently, I apologize.
There is simply an abundance of threads (not just here) that thrive off the meme of OSM technically stagnating etc., that makes it very annoying that in a case in which such a deficit is being addressed it isn’t being acknowledged, even though the work has been widely publicised in essentially every relevant medium (there are even youtube videos on the topic that are easily found).
Oh come on! 
There’s no way that “just googling it” will give any backstory to the long and complicated saga here. Unfortunately, something that someone said once at a conference 10 years ago is irrelevant if it did not result in any actual deliverables. We can argue about why the OSM website sees relatively little change and whether that is a bad thing or a good thing, but to suggest that the story here is easily discoverable doesn’t really stand up.
My recollection, such as it is, is that people have been suggesting something like this since at least 2014. Implementation wouldn’t be straightforward, since some things you might want to do with a user you might want to do to a group, and that might be problematic in some cases. Any implementation would have to closely involve the people looking after the current website’s design.
Separately to this, we also have https://openstreetmap.community (using a set of groups hosted in github), https://www.openstreetmap.org/communities which apparently is more than just a static list of OSMF local chapters, and the pull request mentioned above.
Unfortunately I don’t know of anywhere that describes what “communities” functionality that delivers, and how that fits with the existing three “communities” areas (including this one!). I don’t know what the suggested timescale is behind it being implemented either.
Perhaps it’s worth someone closer to the planning than me explaining what is actually being suggested to happen and by when?
googling the title of this thread will give you plenty of relevant and reasonably current results.
That changing the name of the facility to ‘communities’ (from Microcosms) wasn’t perhaps the best idea, particularly given the overuse of the term in OSM is probably true but orthogonal to the fact that the group functionality is the best publicised work on the website since the licence change.
I get links to “OsmLab”'s github, https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User_group and “OSMF working groups” as the top 3.
Results 4 and 5 (if you don’t count sub results: 2 and 3) are already highly relevant.
Further there are easy to find YT videos from 2022, 2021 and 2019, a complete section in the OSM wiki on the topic, multiple references in LC*WG minutes, discussion on the topic at the 2020 Local Chapters Congress and so on.
To repeat what I said above, not for me:
(and interesting to note, the “osmlab” github isn’t on that list any more, perhaps because I’m in a different location now as far as Google is concerned)
Please actually link to the links that you think are useful so that we can actually read the articles that you are referring to. What Google shows you, me and @Emilius123 is likely to be different in each case, since we’re all in different countries. My search history isn’t affected by a Google login and associated history; yours may be.
Again, please actually link to the content that you are referring to!
I would expect mine and @Emilius123 search results to be very similar, yours seem to be mainly different due to OSM-UK, but in any case
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Communities
https://blog.openstreetmap.de/page/9/
https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Local_Chapters_and_Communities_Working_Group/Meeting_minutes/2020-11-23#Support_the_development_of_Microcosms_(GL#7)
https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Local_Chapters_and_Communities_Working_Group/Meeting_minutes/2020-10-19#microcosm_(GL#7)
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Foundation/Local_Chapters/Local_Chapters_Congress/2020
Thanks. However, of those links, only https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Communities seems to have been updated recently? On that page there seem to be no timescales (or even estimates). What is the expected date of the merge?
When Andy gets around to reviewing it?
I’m assuming that so many people and parts of the OSMF are heavily invested in this that it will be merged once any remaining issues have been fixed (if there are any).
Thanks - that’s really what I was asking.
