I see many diaries on OSM, but unfortunately the good ones are hard to find, if they can be found at all.

In this diary, I offer some perspectives, without any technical pretensions, but just for the thinking of “what it might look like” in the vein of “Reimagining the OSM.org” or “Better-osm-org” but without the technical side.

This diary is a proposal, a reflection. Its aim is to offer a vision of what diaries might look like in the future.

Observation

Many diaries published by the community are interesting, not all of them are, but those that are would benefit from being discovered and promoted to a wider audience.

Diaries are not discoverable from osm.org. When a diary is discovered, it is almost exclusively through direct sharing via an OSM communication channel (forum, Telegram, Discord, etc.).

The aim is to offer ways to find interesting diaries more easily, to know which ones the community values or finds interesting.

Proposal

Categorise

Allowing diaries to be categorised offers several advantages:

• Easier to identify the topic(s) of a diary
• Have a list of diaries talking of a specific topic
• Easier to find a specific diary

A category would group together several diaries addressing the same theme.

This categorisation might be done in the form of keywords, for example: #tutorial #josm #streetcomplete #sotm #telecom #esri.

Add upvotes

To enable the community to highlight the diaries that have generated the most interest and that they found most useful, it would be possible to add a like (or a downvote or an emoji reaction) to a diary.

The same options for comments might be used to highlight the comments most appreciated by the community.

This system would be very similar to GitLab for issues, or Reddit for content.

Diaries search

Once the keyword categories are in place, followed by the community’s reactions to the diaries, it will be possible to explore the diaries according to different criteria: by category, by reactions, by comments, by creation date, or even by location.

“Community Diaries > Share” a landing page for diaries

“Community Diaries > Explore” a page for curating diaries