[NUUG fiksgatami] FixMystreet in Norway?

[Tom Steinberg]

Dear Petter,

On 17 December 2010 12:17, Petter Reinholdtsen <pere at hungry.com> wrote:
> Following up on this, as we have not seen any replies for our request
> so far.

Unfortunately I have not seen any previous correspondence about this,
and now I see that it is because it was marking all Christer's emails
as spam. So sorry! I am very glad you persisted with emailing today.

> [Christer Gundersen 2010-11-15]
>> We have now gathered some partners who are willing to contribute
>> with funding, we look forward to a response from you on wether if
>> you guys in MySociety can help to bring up the Norwegian website.

> From our point of view it is preferable if the current developers of
> the fixmystreet source code extend it to be more usable outside
> Britain, for several reasons.

This is fantastic news, and we would love to work with you on this
project. I know that everyone in mySociety will be extremely keen to
see this succeed.

The FixMyStreet codebase is quite mature now, and we have learned
quite a lot of lessons about the small things that make running such a
site harder than it seems, so I agree that it would be best if we
could build on what we have here rather than starting with a new team
elsewhere.

There remains, however, one key question, which is how much money
might be available to do this project? Packaging and supporting
software for re-use in other countries is a lot harder than building
it in the first place.

Looking forward to further conversation about this - especially that
doesn't get spammed!

best,

Tom Steinberg








>
>  - Those know the code best, and can adjust it to handle GPS
>   coordinates and other map sources with the least amount of work,
>   because less time is needed to become familiar with the code.
>
>  - This will directly help those in other countries that want to set
>   up their own version of fixmystreet, reducing the effort needed to
>   get it operational.
>
>  - No need to try to push changes back into the mysociety, as it is
>   done in the master source.
>
>  - Less maintenance effort, as only one version of the source exist
>   and no need for merges and forward porting of patches in the
>   future.
>
> But if MySociety do not have time to do this, or even worse, do not
> have time to reply to our request if you have time to do this, we will
> have to start looking for alternatives.  An obvious alternative is to
> get someone here in Norway to do the coding, but it will be more work
> and probably create more maintenance work in the future.
>
> Because of this, I hope you soon find time to reply to the requests
> Christer sent.
>
> If you lost the email Christer sent, it is available from
> <URL: http://lists.nuug.no/pipermail/fiksgatami/2010-November/000140.html >.
>
> Happy hacking,
> --
> Petter Reinholdtsen
>