OpenStreetMap
Planning a trip to a remote area and realized it would be really cool to meet other mappers in the region where i’m traveling. Wish there was an easy way to broadcast a message to the top/recent contributors in a location. Right now the easiest way seems to be looking at the the list of top users when editing in iD and sending them message.
Any other tools that could help? Very few users are on any community communication channels here in India.
Discussion
Comment from Richard on 6 December 2016 at 10:50
Groups on osm.org! :)
A halfway functional pull request exists (https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/pull/297) but it was never finished and needs restarting from scratch, really. But the intention was absolutely to cater for situations like this.
Comment from PlaneMad on 6 December 2016 at 13:30
Groups would have been so good. For a community thats so much about interacting and exploring, there is woefully inadequate interactions on the website itself.
Comment from Zverik on 6 December 2016 at 15:33
The best way for now is to search for local communities. E.g. when I’ve travelled to Portugal, I’ve wrote a message to the talk-pt@ mailing list. Despite a few replies nothing came out of it, but it could be fun.
When you’re in Russia, definitely post me a line so I can organize a pub meetup :)
Comment from Jean-Marc Liotier on 7 December 2016 at 11:21
Even if only a tiny minority participates in mailing lists or other gregarious electronic exchanges, those who do may be in touch with local groups… That way I met a bunch of stealth contributors in a couple of countries.
Comment from mvexel on 7 December 2016 at 17:57
Richard, I still feel bad about never coming through with completing that effort…Who can I muster to revive it?
Comment from d1g on 8 December 2016 at 11:09
Mailing lists are dead, few use IRC regularly; the only way to spot local mappers is http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/oooc
And guess who forms a community and who is not. Some users may take a 1 year break in edits but can consult you anyway.