[HOT] a more extreme HOT task manager

[Laurent Savaëte]

Hi all,

thanks for your answers.
I'm probably not experienced enough to see what distinction you make 
between the OSM community and outsiders. That said, I can see how a 
very accessible tool may attract people who might be less committed to 
the quality of their work than regular OSM mappers.

On thing I may not be aware of, but worth asking. When I contributed 
several hundred polygons in the south of Madagascar, was any of it 
validated by anyone? Are any such systems in place in the OSM community?

Taking Andrew's example of non square buildings, I'm thinking JOSM has 
a function for squaring up polygons, which I could imagine to 
automatically apply to any "building-type" contribs in a microtasking 
setting.
Going further, the current TM requires (suggests?) validation of all 
contributed areas (red/completed tasks can turn green/validated). What 
does that entail? Would it be feasible to automated that validation? Or 
maybe run aggregated microtasked contributions under the eyes of 
experienced mappers once a sufficient zone has been completed?

As Andrew pointed out, the intermediate store could be a very useful 
idea to buffer contributions before actually committing them to the OSM 
db.

I like the maproulette tool, but I think it still has the main issues 
that bugged me: you need JOSM and a number of things in place, when all 
you're contributing at the moment ("current challenge: motorway lane 
count") is a single digit.

At any rate, thanks a lot for sharing your wisdom on this, it's easy to 
miss essential things. Unless someone strongly objects to it, I'd be 
tempted to just fork the hotTM code on github, and try my luck at 
building a simple demo when I have some spare time.

Laurent

On Mon 01 Jul 2013 07:14:54 AM CEST, Andrew Buck wrote:
> 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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