OpenStreetMap
You can now preview OSM notes in iD by pressing ‘F’ to open the map data pane, enabling notes, and zooming in. Much like on osm.org, you can toggle on and off the notes layer, close / reopen notes, comment on them, and follow links to a note or its creator on osm.org. Give it a try and let me know what you think! We are compiling feature requests such as filtering, note templating, etc. Also, feel free to search and open issues related to bugs or desirable features. Before the next release of iD, expect an add Note button as well (as seen in the image below).
Additionally, along with Bryan Housel and Marc Farra (my GSoC 2018 mentors), I am researching how OSM users use notes. We hope to make notes more useful, more consistent, and potentially a rejuvenated outlet for stronger socialization and communication across the OSM community. Therefore, if you have feedback on how to improve notes (or what you use notes for), please comment below! In my next blog post, I’ll provide more fuel for ideas by sharing note features that we have already started working on.
Until next time,
-Thomas Hervey
Discussion
Comment from philippec on 20 July 2018 at 20:23
Very nice, with my excellent notes certainly.
Comment from GinaroZ on 20 July 2018 at 21:58
I’d say notes (and changeset comments) could do with a notification service on the OSM website - like personal messages - rather than just using emails (as some people have said they went into spam). That way they will get noticed more and conversations can occur.
For notes - there could be status categories which can be selected for each note:
awaiting new imagery - to allow a basic outline of the construction area and/or new roads needs a GPS survey - driving/cycling/walking through needs a full survey - to get all of the street names and details
Comment from Tractor on 21 July 2018 at 07:43
Very nice.
Comment from DaCor on 29 July 2018 at 12:54
This is great work
In terms of making them more useful, I know the Irish OSM community utilised the feed from Pascal’s site to have new notes pop up in the IRC chatroom so they uswed to be actioned fairly rapidly. Not so much these days as the IRC chat is not as busy as it once was
Comment from Mateusz Konieczny on 30 July 2018 at 08:32
Great feature! Thanks for everybody involved!
Comment from RicoElectrico on 3 August 2018 at 10:20
That’s what I envisioned, although storing such info outside OSM DB, in a Flask app.
Making it easier to triage / label notes could be so beneficial as it would make it a true “bug tracking” system.
Imagine “needs survey” notes could be given to even inexperienced users so they could make a photo (or GPS track) and help us this way.