[HOT] a more extreme HOT task manager

[Andrew Buck]

Kate,

The recent microtasking development you refer to is called Kuona, and was
developed by IRC user PovAddict.  It was not for finding water wells, but
instead for finding towns in large, empty desert areas.  Other than that
you are correct though; I just wanted to clarify that point.

I agree that a microtasking tool for buildings attracts a different user
base, but I think that is good and that is what we tried explicitly with
Kuona.  The idea was to make it easy for "non-osm'ers" to contribute by
giving them something very easy, and completely hiding the OSM interface
and data model away from them; just look at a picture, and click on the
village, or click "nothing here" if you were just getting a picture of
empty desert.

This kind of thing could work well for tracing buildings, however for
actual map editing like that you run into problems.  For example, buildings
should usually be orthogonal and josm/potlatch have tools to do this, but
random users clicking on a microtasking tool may not understand this.
Non-square buildings are as much work to "clean up" as they are to just
trace from nothing, so it may not work as well as you think.  This is not
an unsolvable task, and I don't mean to discourage this kind of thinking,
but we need to engineer the editor in such a way that the data contributed
can be used.

With Kuona, the user data was not put into OSM directly, but instead was
just used to tell normal OSM mappers where to look to do their mapping.
This kind of "hybrid" approach worked very well, since the non-OSM
community could still contribute, however their contributions did not go
straight into the DB but instead were passed through other OSM users with
more experience and therefore a certain lack of quality was not a problem.
So basically the thing that worked well was not that non-osm people were
giving us data (which may be of questionable quality), but instead were
making osm people work more efficiently through their efforts.

Anyway, just some things to consider when working on these microtasking
systems.

-AndrewBuck
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