[HOT] slow time mapper productivity

Suzan Reed suzan at suzanreed.com
Sat May 9 09:07:17 UTC 2015


Pierre and all, 

Has collecting data from these new contributors been considered? It would be interesting to know why some stick and why the rest leave. 

A simple SurveyMonkey query would tell why a whopping 2,820 contributors worked only one day and why only 864 newbies stuck around. That data could be used to direct the new training material and to change the landing page for OSM. 

The survey would need to be carefully written to return useful data, hopefully by someone adept and experienced in survey writing. There must be data gathering experts in the team. 

Features of the survey could include 
boxes where survey participants can leave messages in their own words, 
asking for contributor's background (college student, retired, working full time, professional background, degrees, etc.)
where they heard about the project, 
how difficult they found using the software, 
what frustrations and joys they found in participating, 
if they plan on contributing in the future,
what would make their experience easier, more interesting, etc., and 
what they suggest for improvement. 
If something could be put together soon, these 3,684 people could give valuable data. Hopefully email addresses were gathered with registration? 

Suzan 


On May 8, 2015, at 7:21 PM, Pierre Béland wrote:

Editors, either ID or JOSM will surely evolve to be more intuitive for new contributors. 

If we look at the characteristics of the contributors for the first 12 days of this Nepal response
- 5,765 contributors
- 3,684 opened an OSM account since Apr. 25
- 2,820 of these new contributors contributed only one day

My opinion is that we should not concentrate on the volume of edits made by these contributors, but assure that they can learn the basis rapidly and produce data of quality.  The mapathons bring in numerous of new contributors that become aware of OpenStreetMap, which is a good result. We need tools to have the capacity to follow their edits as they learn this to assure that they master the basic concepts of editing. It would be interesting to analyze how we can retain more contributors, wha make them come back to edit for a second day. 

 
Pierre 

De : Russell Deffner <russell.deffner at hotosm.org>
À : 'Tom McDonald' <tmcd123 at gmail.com>; 'Kretzer' <kretzer at gmx.net> 
Cc : hot at openstreetmap.org 
Envoyé le : Vendredi 8 mai 2015 21h11
Objet : Re: [HOT] slow time mapper productivity

Hi Tom and Kretzer,
 
Something to note, is there are other advantages and disadvantages to the various editors and that is why we must allow for people to choose which one is right for them.  In some places we work, people are less familiar with computers and the internet.  In some cases, just being a desktop editor makes JOSM more familiar and easier to work with.  In other cases it can be difficult to explain what Java is and why JOSM doesn’t work without it.  You can be more certain that they already have a browser installed; many of our first day trainings in the field are a bit of general computer usage to start.  Locally during a disaster there may not be an internet and you need offline capability, but possibly there is hit and miss cell service enough to use a mobile editor.
 
This is what makes it pretty much impossible to just ‘flip a switch’ and have everyone using the same tools and methods and find a training method that works for all (not to mention different learning styles, etc.)  I can say that in my short time with OSM, there have been leaps and bounds in making things more user friendly as well as easier to check quality, use the data, etc., etc.  I remember there were a few videos made by Steve Coast showing how to edit with Potlatch, and they worked to get me started (and were rather entertaining/comical) but somewhat showcase two issues I often think about regarding training tools: translation and shelf-life; I think those videos may have disappeared already, but even at the time I watched them, things had changed and they were showing their age.
 
I know this was a bit more than a reply just to this thread, but sort of a reply in general to a lot of topics; please do keep up the conversation, we can always do better,
=Russ
 


From: Tom McDonald [mailto:tmcd123 at gmail.com] 
Sent: Friday, May 08, 2015 6:43 PM
To: Kretzer
Cc: hot at openstreetmap.org
Subject: Re: [HOT] slow time mapper productivity
 
I agree John - JOSM should be encouraged for building mapping. I do not think it deserves a difficult reputation. 
 
An awesome and easy to use feature (besides the building tool of course) is the filter: setting one to hide all building=* makes it really easy to flip all buildings on/off. This makes it easier to see buildings you may have missed.

Tom
 
On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 5:25 PM, Kretzer <kretzer at gmx.net> wrote:
Or you could go the other way and ad a building tool to iD.
This needs to be kept simple I guess, but there could be some tools to speed up editing in iD.
 
Antoher thing that makes editing in iD slower is that you can always only edit one item a time. I'd like to be able to select several objects and move them, or tag them together.
 
Gesendet: Samstag, 09. Mai 2015 um 01:45 Uhr
Von: "john whelan" <jwhelan0112 at gmail.com>
An: "hot at openstreetmap.org" <hot at openstreetmap.org>
Betreff: [HOT] slow time mapper productivity
This is definitely slow time and not something to distract HOT at the moment.

Mapping buildings is not my favourite occupation.  I reward myself by breaking off and sending the odd email etc from time to time so the figures below are not head down hard mapping of buildings.
 
However I noticed that in a one hour session in Nepal I mapped around six hundred buildings using JOSM building_tool including one or two odd shaped ones <shift>J thanks to Blake's video.
 
If I look at the tiles I'm working on I see that half the mappers only map twenty buildings or less and there aren't that many mappers mapping over a hundred buildings in a tile.
 
Does it matter?  If we were paying mappers for their time then yes it would, we aren't but even so think how much more quickly we could complete projects with the same resources and we won't even talk about data quality issues.
 
I understand that JOSM has acquired a reputation for being hard to teach and use by some but perhaps with suitable guidelines we can get a bit more productivity out of our mappers? 

Cheerio John
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