Nice work, Tom. Whether or not coffee price turns out to be interesting to have in OSM in the long run, I completely agree that topic-specific editors are a useful addition to the OSM toolkit. Thanks for creating and sharing this.

I like your terminology, Alex. Topic and subscribe keep us focused on these improvements as easy-to-access aggregations across OSM data and services, slicing by theme and/or location, with both on-demand access and (eventually) background notifications.

Rather than “social” as a goal to implement in itself–one that gets us worried about implementing a poor version of Snapchat within OSM.org–improved collaboration can, hopefully, be a result of these new views.

Thanks for putting group functionality into context within the entire ecosystem of OSM, Alex. As an intermediate-level user of OSM (and one who’s been looking for more ways to actively contribute), I’ve found the fragmentation of OSM services frustrating in how it magnifies the natural confusion of an organic community like OSM’s.

I agree that adding another compartmentalized silo to OSM would likely create more frustrating fragmentation rather than useful consolidation, and I agree that there’s much to gain from the iterative improvement of functionality that supports collaboration in a lighter-weight manner.

That said, I do see benefit to introducing a formal (and minimal) notion of groups to the OSM.org app/site. At present, OSM.org only acknowledges and supports one-on-one interactions. Anything done by multiple individuals concerned with the same theme or location happens on off-site services.

If OSM.org starts offering the basic ability for users to opt-in to thematic groups (and perhaps location-specific groups in the future), then the site can begin to serve as a centralized “directory of truth”–well, perhaps more modestly a centralized “directory of guidance”–to individuals interesting in joining collaborative efforts.

Perhaps today this is just a set of links to off-site resources, like Meetup, Facebook, OSM mailing lists, the OSM wiki, etc., as Mikel was mentioning. Down the line, this also means that OSM.org can provide API endpoints that specify groups and group members, for other services’ consumption. Not to limit access; rather, to guide newer users from OSM.org out to these other services.

A very minimal addition of groups to OSM.org could, I suspect, serve as the next step along the “Welcome to OSM” pipeline, after new individuals have contributed an edit in their immediate neighborhood and are looking for ways to further join the community.