I use the Go to Home Location feature on a nearly hourly basis, but probably not for its intended purpose. I still have it set to the town where I grew up and started mapping, my “home base” if you will, even though I’ve lived clear across the continent for over a decade now.
For me, it essentially serves as a bookmark. As an avid reader of this forum and other OSM communication channels, I often follow other mappers’ and users’ links to areas under discussion. As an avid armchair mapper, I also find myself straying quite far from my area of interest after an afternoon of roving edits, in unfamiliar territory. Once I’m done with the task at hand, I want to “reset” the site back to something familiar instead of remembering what I had been looking at.
The Go to Home Location feature isn’t ideal for this purpose. There are two or three other places in the world that I return to frequently, but the site makes me choose one. I really should just set some bookmarks in my browser. But since this feature exists and goes where I want it to, I’ve been too lazy to create those bookmarks. If the site gets rid of the feature, I’ll create them.
Secondarily, I like the idea that someone from my old hometown who has just joined the project can find me if they want to know who put the town on the map. You know, so they can gripe at me for all the misshapen buildings from before it was possible to map them cleanly. It makes the project seem a little less faceless, something people from there would appreciate. And once in a while, I get a little satisfaction seeing the Other Nearby Users map fill up with green pins, where once there was no one around for hundreds of miles. Someday, once Microcosms becomes a reality, this map will seem quite redundant too.
OSM is far from the only site that gives each user an opportunity to proudly associate themselves with where they’re from. This forum also lets you put a home location in your profile, but only as text. It makes sense for a mapping site to plot that location on a map, but it probably isn’t clear enough that someone could “wardrive” others’ home locations using the same feature. Even when I lived in the town I still claim as my Home Location, I intentionally kept it ambiguous by placing it on a bridge in the center of town. But I wonder how many mappers have thought of that.
The site doesn’t really need to ask anyone for their precise location, just the name of a city or maybe a neighborhood if they like. It could store that location as text and geocode it to no more than neighborhood precision. If the resulting map ends up with lots of pins at the exact same location, Leaflet has plenty of options for expanding point clusters.
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and don’t harm anyone with words or deeds,
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