[OSM-dev] [OSM-talk] OSM front page design concept

[Apollinaris Schoell]

Instead of whining about the good and and and the ugly of osm.org and Potlatch and speculating some stats who is contributing to osm

# Planet + daily diff from 2010-02-20
total users, with > 0 objects in a planet file: 66949
total users, with > 10 objects in a planet file: 42450

# North America extract from Nov 2009
total users, with > 0 objects: 8043
total users, with > 10 objects: 4723

# Germany from Geofabrik
total users, with > 0 objects: 24172
total users, with > 10 objects: 16421

users with less than 10 objects are probably not active anymore and their contributions have been reworked or they haven't done anything useful at all.
an even stricter user count quoted from recent talk
8173 as of the beginning of the month, I think.
See http://www.flickr.com/photos/itoworld/4360166105

Don't have the total number of users but remember it was > 130k long time back

Now my speculations.
1/3 -1/2 of users with an account are present in planet
2/3 of active users contributed more than the Potlatch live mode error in their first and last edits
the stricter definition of active users reduces these numbers to 1/8
+1/3 of active users in germany

Except for germany I would say
Osm contributions is still a project for geeks and this will not change anytime soon.
OSB or other bug entry systems for non mappers are pointless until the experienced user base is big enough to be willing to work on bugs rather their own interests.

OSB is really cool idea but definitely lacks 2 features
- add pictures, now all smart-phones have gps and camera.  a pic will tell more than any description. this is easy for anyone to take pics of turn restrictions, speed limits, all kinds of POI. I use Josm with geotagged pics and this is better than anything else and much faster than notebooks, walking papers …
- no contact info. as a mapper it's not possible to verify and ask for more details. sure anonymous bugs should be allowed but many people are willing to share their contact email and will love the idea to get points for a certain number of bugs, or a voting system ala amazon reviews might attract non mappers.