Systeme D

20 September 2006

A potlatch of penguin meat

Steve's EuroOSCon talk also references Coase's Penguin, which I'd not heard of before, but which neatly describes something I'm working on at the moment.

Potlatch (merely a codename) is a Flash-based editor for Openstreetmap data. In contrast to the prevalent, excellent JOSM editor, Potlatch is intended for immediate use rather than for power users. (For those already familiar with OSM, perhaps the most obvious example of this is that there's no facility to edit nodes or segments other than as part of a way.)

After many months of saying "I'm going to write a Flash editor, honest", I've finally kicked into gear and it's now progressing rather nicely. Along the way. I'm learning lots more about techniques like Flash Remoting.

Coast's Penguin (aka Coase's Penguin as interpreted by Coast) says that open data, like Wikipedia or Openstreetmap, is produced when the environment is "fun", "takes five minutes", and "easy". OSM is already fun, but for the new untrained user, is not especially easy or immediate. Potlatch is specifically designed to tackle both of those.

More to follow.

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