[HOT] Projects on the HOT OSM Tasking Manager - lots of them

[Kai Krueger]

Hi,

I just wanted to add my own experience and suggestions regarding the marking
tiles done in the task managers.

The term "done" is really very binary and somewhat difficult to define.
Particularly when remote mapping, there will always be some features that
one can't recognize or is unsure about and thus might leave out. Is the tile
then done or not? Because of that I could imagine some people will err on
the side of caution and basically mark nothing as done, and others might
take it as because mapping is never truly done, even a first rough pass is
"done" enough.

I wonder if it would thus be helpful to make the "marking done" system a bit
more fine scaled? I.e. either have a slider for percentages of completeness,
or at least break it into lets say 4 - 5  categories, like "partly mapped",
"mostly mapped".

Furthermore, I am wondering if it be worth splitting the "done" by features?
I.e one can say that the "roads" are "mostly mapped", the "rivers" are
"partly mapped" and buildings are "hardly mapped". Or if specific aspects of
lets say buildings are to be mapped. Like one task that requested if roofs
are "permanent / corrugated metal" or "natural", then it might be useful to
break out the completeness by features. E.g. "mapping buildings" can be
"mostly done", but "mapping roof top properties", is only "partially done".
That might be useful when one is comfortable mapping some aspects, but not
others.

That gives people who want to chose a tile a much better overview of what to
expect and can choose the tiles better according to their abilities.

It also would make it easier to get better statistics of the overall status
of a task than just the binary "done/not done" of tiles.

Making tiles much smaller, as has been suggested, could potentially be
another option of how to increase someones confidence in that a tile really
is done.



With respect to motivation to contribute, I think it might be useful if more
information could be available about the projects and how mapping really
does help the project and particularly the people affected. For high profile
events like the earthquake in Haiti or Nepal or typhoons, the main stream
media does part of this and everyone prominently sees the pictures and
stories of those affected and thus gains an emotional connectedness to the
task. However, for many of the lower profile, ongoing tasks, that is much
less the case. So perhaps it would be good, if the task descriptions could
have links to project descriptions, blogs or other press material describing
the project and how it tries to help. The more that can be directly related
to the mapping, imho the better. And perhaps it could even include a
description of how the task would have to be done, if the maps created by
HOT were not available. I.e. directly showing how a volunteer mappers work
effects the work of the project. Some of the task descriptions already do a
decent job at this, others imho are too vague to really get excited about.

Just my $.02

Kai




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