I’ve been spending a bit of time recently getting the committers information on asylum working correctly in preperation for it’s move. Sebb has been keeping me honest by catching a lot of minor problems and pointing out IE issues that happily pass me by as Firefox is my browser of choice.

One thing that has started to conern me slightly is the way we add geo data. Presently most people add their actual co-ordinates, but as Sander points out using the maps from the “search engine that isn’t a verb” you can zoom in close enough to see where people live – which isn’t really what is intended. Having a map showing where committers are in the world is great and does really demonstrate how diverse the ASF community is, but I think we need to think more about how we store and use the data.

In one of those “I knew I should bookmark that” moments I read a blog entry about a different way of encoding your location that seemed as though it was very close to what I wanted, but of course there are so many blog pages out there… I think it was posted on PlanetRDF – anyone care to point me in the right direction?

UPDATE: I found the page by going through my browser history. It describes WAIL, which I think is closer to the style of information we should be using. Figuring out how to use this within our framework will take some thought as we still need someway of getting a plottable lat/long from the locations people provide.

The site recently passed a minor milestone when we passed the 10% involvement mark. Hopefully when the site moves to it’s final home (asylum is presently meant to be a development sandbox) more people will decide it’s worth adding their details. I don’t think we’ll ever reach 100% and I’m going to continue my opposition to generating files for all committers – having your data displayed will always be voluntary.

The feedback we’ve had has been so infrequent and so many people have added their details I’m assuming the instructions are clear enough – but if not then I’d love to hear from you.

If you’re a committer and haven’t yet added your details, why not add them now?