[WelcomeWG] Messages to new mappers in Poland - an initial analysis of their effect

[SomeoneElse]

As you may know, new users in Poland are sent a welcome message:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:Balrog/Powitanie

It includes some helpful information such as notes about background 
imagery, and a link to the "Poland" subforum on the OSM forum.  It was 
changed slightly for Christmas, but otherwise has remained the same 
since the start.

>From  2nd November 2012 the process was changed to only send the message 
to 3/4 of new users (selected randomly by whether their UID was 
divisible by 4 or not).  I was sent a file of who was messaged and who 
wasn't by Andrzej Zaborowski, and I had a look to see which mappers were 
still mapping.

Initially I looked at new mappers listed as starting between 2nd 
November 2012 and 2nd December 2012, and determined whether they were 
still mapping by looking to see whether they submitted any changesets 
between 20th December 2012 and today (20th January 2013).  Depending on 
when in the period they started, that's between 18 days and 2.5 months.

I used the changesets API to obtain changesets for a particular userid 
in that date range:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/API_v0.6#Query:_GET_.2Fapi.2F0.6.2Fchangesets

and the results were as follows:

Of those who were messaged, 27 of 144 are "still mapping" (19%)
Of those who not were messaged, 10 of 41 are "still mapping" (24%)

I suspect, given the relatively small numbers involved, that that's "too 
close to call" really.  I'll have another look in a month's time of 
mappers who started in December to see if they're still mapping in an 
equivalent period.

Obviously there are lots of other things that I've not looked at here 
(number of changesets and changeset quality being two obvious ones).  
I'd also have liked to have been able to check a longer period out 
(perhaps "still mapping after 6 months"), but will have to wait a bit to 
do that.

Thanks to the Polish community who did all the work setting all this up 
- I'm just doing the counting.  Finally, I think that it's also worth 
mentioning that 19-24% still mapping is actually quite a good retention 
rate (I've not done exactly the same analysis but suspect that it's 
higher than in the UK, for example).

Cheers,
Andy