where is the like-button for those tiles? they look very nice :) I think it's a good approach to offer swiss users who are not familiar with osm something they "know"; a map style that is more or less based on map styles swiss people know and thus look somewhat appealing and familiar is a good approach. enriching such a map with swiss-centric overlays and services would be awesome and definitely a long-term project. I think that is what osm needs (in every country) to gain widespread popularity and acceptance among people that just want to have a map and routing etc. I know that osm is more than that, but lets face it: we don't need to target people who are already familiar with osm... we want to increase community size (do we?); we have to spread the word and offer services people are familiar with (map, routing). and having a good looking map and matching page (simple search box, not too much links and infos) that people want to use is a good start. people are familiar with google. and even if osm is more than that, to a lot of newcomers osm is just another map like google maps. and whats the point in having a lot of possibilities with osm if people don't use them because their first contact was disappointing because the homepage was overloaded, the search function did not work correctly and the map looked crappy (lets be honest: default mapnik and osmarender styles are not beauty queens compared to other, commercial services out there; they do what they are supposed too, but not more). serving more people increases our impact. so I think making "the map" nad the homepage more attractive is - for now - a good start. not only for our swiss branch.
I do like the idea of having some sort of "community portal" with links etc. like other countries (germany) do. but I think that having a good, swiss centric map on a simple page with not too much content helps us to promote the brand openstreetmap among our swiss citizens. and the more people know about osm and start using it, the better. lets just offer the map and a search box and maybe a link with more info. that's it. keep it simple and clean. because in my opinion osm.org is not a good implementation of "a map". its a good start to get to know osm, but not a place where the average user will be happy. and openstreetmap.de even less. And in my opinion - I might be wrong! - osm needs a platform to establish its own brand among normal non-cartographers. its nice that osm is used in a variety of services, like mapquest, navdroid, you name them! but the brand osm gets lost that way. And at the moment we are dependent on people knowing osm. not only what the project is, but also that the project itself is attractive without the dependence of other providers. a community portal like germany has is certainly a good idea, but I doubt that we (Switzerland) ever will be big enough to take advantage of a community portal while sacrificing the benefits of offering a simple, solid map service. Especially while we are dependent on how people perceive osm. and perceiving it as a solid, fast alternative to established map services is always a good start. the dutch approach is good, indeed. but before thinking about slideouts we should concentrate on the map itself.
and yes, we should only offer content we can maintain and run in a reasonable way. and with a good performance (tile rendering!). so my main question is: can we?
Marc.
On 09.06.2011 09:02, Stefan Keller wrote:
Hi,
2011/6/9 yvecaiyvecai@gmail.com wrote:
If we don't have swiss tiles to show, I pretty like the http://www.openstreetmap.nl
Actually we do have Swiss tiles from our OSM-in-a-Box project: http://geometa.hsr.ch/map/ . That was an experiment with a Swiss style GeoServer (not Mapnik). But it's only an prototype since we are not prepared (yet) to host such a thing .
Five languages should be the minimum
There exists also a http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/DE:Switzerland/Deutschschweizer_Dialektka... ... :->
Yours, Stefan _______________________________________________ talk-ch mailing list talk-ch@openstreetmap.ch http://lists.openstreetmap.ch/mailman/listinfo/talk-ch