Working Group Minutes/EWG 2015-01-19

From OpenStreetMap Foundation

Attendees

IRC nick Real name
gravitystorm Andy Allan
RichardF Richard Fairhurst
TomH Tom Hughes
zere Matt Amos

Summary

  • Ideas for hack weekends:
    • Vector tiles
    • Lovely Friendly OSM-branded Mobile App That Will Attract Millions More Contributors To Do Actual Real On-The-Ground Surveying
    • Inline tag editing for rails_port
    • General rails_port stuff: routing branch, 'rubocop', 'devise', etc...
    • Groups?

IRC Log

17:31:47 <zere> minutes of the last meeting: http://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Working_Group_Minutes/EWG_2015-01-12 - please let me know if anything needs changing.
17:31:58 <zere> #topic actions
17:32:34 <zere> we had one action arising from last meeting: RichardF, gravitystorm, pnorman, TomH, zere: think of a theme for a hack weekend to discuss next week
17:34:13 <zere> RichardF: what thoughts did you have?
17:35:33 <RichardF> vector tiles seems the obvious theme to me. I'd like to have a 'OSM mobile app' one, too, but I don't think we're quite ready to do that yet.
17:36:59 <zere> what kind of mobile app, though? an editor like vespucci?
17:38:18 <RichardF> Lovely Friendly OSM-branded Mobile App That Will Attract Millions More Contributors To Do Actual Real On-The-Ground Surveying
17:38:43 <RichardF> aka OSM's presence in the App Store namespace, just as osm.org is our presence in the web namespace.
17:38:59 <RichardF> but like I say, the idea is a bit embryonic ;) (or vapourware, if you're being less kind)
17:41:24 <zere> it's an interesting idea. i wonder how it would work to have an "official" app where we don't even really have an official editor (although i suppose having a 'default' one is pretty close)
17:41:59 <RichardF> yeah. the analogue is osm.org rather than iD/P2/JOSM, really.
17:43:25 <zere> right, so more of a 'demo' app that showcases what's possible with OSM data rather than an editor... but hooked into some kind of surveying / tracing / mapillary / something?
17:44:10 <zere> s/tracing/GPS tracing/ - to be clear ;-)
17:44:57 <RichardF> yep. it could be transformational for a lot of things - address surveying, for one. and steering it back to EWG, it needs a skillset (iOS/Android development) that we don't have in our core dev community at the moment
17:47:09 <zere> it seems like a lot of the pieces (mapbox's mobile SDK, mapillary's API (perhaps they'd share / open their SDK?), various GPX loggers) are already around
17:47:34 <zere> so perhaps it's not out of the realms of possibility for a weekend.
17:47:48 <zere> gravitystorm: what thoughts did you have?
17:48:01 <RichardF> yes, I think so. the one thing that we don't have at the moment, and which would give the app a lot more potential, is vector tiles on osm.org :)
17:48:26 <gravitystorm> zere: I had my thoughts last week :-) Rails Port stuff mainly.
17:48:55 <gravitystorm> if you want a fresh^Wrehashed example, then I would say 'inline tag editing'
17:49:07 <gravitystorm> along with all the cgimap stuff that I want to work on
17:49:14 <RichardF> and routing
17:50:12 <zere> RichardF: routing as in jsrouting branch?
17:50:14 <RichardF> yep
17:50:31 <RichardF> as in "part of a Rails port hack weekend"
17:51:00 <zere> yeah, i think TomH is/will be reviewing that at some point - i'm not sure (i really hope) there's not enough work left before the initial release to need a whole hack weekend.
17:51:11 <zere> but there's a lot of stuff that was put off for v2
17:51:40 <RichardF> zere: oh, absolutely. just thinking that if TomH identifies fixes that need to be made, we could polish them off as part of gravitystorm's suggested Rails port hack weekend
17:51:41 <zere> perhaps a hack weekend on jsrouting2, to add... a better UI? ... what else?
17:51:42 <gravitystorm> I can throw in some rails port keywords like 'devise', 'rubocop', 'rspec' etc if people need ideas
17:52:02 <gravitystorm> but those aren't exactly enticing more like hard work.
17:53:46 <zere> i think some of that will get easier and more enticing once the rails port is smaller and doing more of what rails was designed to do: make a website.
17:55:59 <zere> pnorman: what thoughts did you have?
17:58:23 <zere> TomH: what thoughts did you have?
17:58:37 <TomH> on what?
18:00:05 <zere> on themes for a hack weekend
18:00:47 <TomH> I don't really have any
18:02:17 <zere> i was also thinking about groups - it's a bit of a nebulous feature, but the core of it seems doable in a weekend. RichardF - do you think so?
18:02:20 <TomH> I mean I struggle to think of anything that might attract enough tpeople to work
18:02:55 <RichardF> zere: absolutely. I think it's the sort of feature that would benefit from four people hacking on it rather than 20, but as part of a wider Rails port weekend that may not be a bad thing.
18:03:36 <zere> sure, but if we don't try we'll never know. i think a key criterion is whether there's enough spread of technology / skills in the theme to attract a broad range of people.
18:04:02 <TomH> it's hard for multiple people to work on something like a rails port feature at the same time
18:04:11 <zere> RichardF: do you think 'groups' needs to be better defined first?
18:05:00 <TomH> or indeed anything that doesn't naturally decompose into independent modules
18:05:18 <RichardF> zere: I think most of the ideas have been expressed... somewhere... but before a hack weekend there'd certainly be some work to do in getting them all together into a coherent whole
18:06:34 <zere> hmm... then we'd have to be pretty disciplined to stop the whole weekend disappearing into one long bike-shedding discussion
18:06:57 <RichardF> zere: well, ideally, we'd have the plan ready _before_ the weekend
18:08:24 <zere> haven't there already been some plans? i seem to remember there was a group of people including yourself and Martijn who were putting something together?
18:08:35 <RichardF> yep, exactly that. it's just the plans are a bit scattered.
18:08:59 <RichardF> some in diary entries, some in pages somewhere on github.com/osmlab, etc.
18:10:30 <zere> so it sounds to me like vector tiles is a pretty popular option?
18:11:22 <TomH> I think it more chance of being parallelisable
18:11:26 <RichardF> +1 from me
18:12:17 <zere> yes, there are definitely different 'strands' of work in C++, databases, JS, cartography, etc... within the general umbrella of 'vector tiles'.
18:15:43 <zere> okay, sounds like that's sorted then :-)
18:17:28 <zere> and you're all hereby roped into helping ;-)
18:19:58 <zere> #topic AoB
18:20:07 <zere> was there anything else anyone wanted to talk about?
18:26:30 <zere> i guess not. thanks to everyone for coming, and hope to see you next week!