OSM Teams integration

[kamicut]

I'm submitting a feature request, integrating OSM Teams with OSMCha

Brief Description

Development Seed recently launched OSM Teams — an independent authentication API that has a framework for creating teams and roles. As an independent API, Teams is a separate, lightweight service that associates teams & roles to OSM user accounts. The API can be used with global OSM or with containerized instances of OSM, such as private sandboxes. OSM Teams is a “glue” service that client apps can integrate with to provide teams functionality. Team members, ownership and features are respected in tools across the OSM ecosystem, no matter where the team is created.

It would be great to integrate OSM Teams into OSMCha to expand on the existing team features and allow for greater coordination between groups in OSM.

What is the motivation / use case for this feature?

The current teams integration that @willemarcel introduced is a great first step for bringing teams to OSMCha. We can replace that with OSM Teams so creating, editing and managing new teams can immediately have a better interface, and in the future it would be easy to add private teams and roles.

We’d like to propose an MVP and outline a short future roadmap for this feature.

MVP

First, we could replace the existing teams feature to pull a list of Teams and Members from the OSM Teams API. This would be a client-side integration and can be carried out without a lot of effort. It would allow us to test what kind of teams functionality makes the most sense for OSMCha.

Integration

To integrate OSMCha with teams, we propose to use the public teams endpoint that requires no authentication tokens. This would be an GET request to the OSM teams API and could be either integrated in the client-side javascript within the filter form, or on the server side to allow for caching and pagination. You can test the GET request here or use curl:

curl https://dev.mapping.team/api/teams

Filtering

OSM Teams has some filtering functionality: You can filter teams using bounding box which will return the latitude, longitude pair that the Team has marked as their “location”. You can also filter by a user id that is part of the team’s member list. We’ll soon add functionality to integrate a free text search.

Team creation / updating

For an MVP, we do not want to integrate the OSMCha login with the OSM Teams OAuth. This still allows the user access to public information, but limits the API functionality. To create or update a team, a user will have to go to https://mapping.team and sign in, and edit teams on that site.

Importing existing teams

There are existing teams in OSMCha that we would have to migrate to OSM Teams for a seamless integration. This can be done by writing a script to import the team and the moderators to OSM Teams.

Future

The core idea of OSM Teams is to allow private and public teams, and to give each application the freedom to implement how they want to use this information. Whether that is creating custom roles and structures or building an entirely different experience. In the future, OSMCha can integrate into the OSM Teams platform, and allow for creating and reading personal private teams through the OSMCha interface.