[HOT] Comment to HOT project managers about getting your project completed

[Russell Deffner]

Hi John,

 

Of course; as always – great commentary on how to do better validation.

 

>From my recent personal experience, there is no way to do any ‘large scale’ project(s) with one person validating.  As example, for Fiji – we have just crossed the 12 projects 100% complete/100% validated mark (without a ‘full-blown activation”) and mostly I have created (and ‘third’ validated) those projects (thanks to Blake for created a handful).  However, as I just mentioned – I do a ‘third validation’ for any projects I create. So, I do try to ‘jump in’ and validate a few tiles while the project is in ‘first draft’. However, mostly I’m about 2 or 3 projects behind doing an entire ‘island-wide’ validation. In this case I can guarantee that if we had the ‘level of interest’ of a ‘international disaster’ (as far as media is concerned) then we would need about 3 or 4 people doing what I am doing now.

 

In general, especially with the ‘small islands’ of Fiji, it’s manageable to ‘sort-of’ maintain the entire ‘incident’ with just a few of us; but HOT is definitely in need of building capacity (which is also one of the reason’s I was personally against an ‘activation declaration’ because I think more than a few hundred mappers focusing on Fiji would actually be bad).

 

=Russ

 

From: john whelan [mailto:jwhelan0112 at gmail.com] 
Sent: Thursday, March 03, 2016 5:36 PM
To: hot at openstreetmap.org
Subject: [HOT] Comment to HOT project managers about getting your project completed

 

There have been a number of projects recently that have been mapped to a fairly high standard and within a much shorter time frame than most without having an urgent tag on them.

Basically they have had someone validating them from the beginning and validating the work as it is done.  For consistency reasons it's helpful if just one person takes the responsibility.  I think by now you're aware that your project gets the lime light for about two weeks before it falls below the newer projects on the list.  Those magic two weeks seem to make or break the project.  If you can get the interest of a few mappers in those two weeks then it starts to snowball and you get a sort of team effect.  To build on it I've seen a project manager role out a new project as the old one gets completed and manage to retain the experienced mappers who were mapping the first project.

Maperthons are nice in that you get a lot of people but for data quality first time mappers aren't the best and their productivity isn't anywhere near some of the more experienced mappers using JOSM.  The other problem of new mappers is they sometimes validate other work which means you can't trust the validation.  Some maperthons are well organised and train well, they also get people coming back time after time so their mappers are not all inexperienced.  Others well, when you look at a project and see twenty untagged ways, or fifty buildings tagged as area=yes you question the training.


http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSM_Tasking_Manager/Validating_data

What isn't mentioned here is the feedback, it is important getting the tone right makes the difference between getting someone to map correctly in the future or saying forget this I'm off to play badminton.  Mappers have different cultures and backgrounds, they are volunteers so treat them gently and use third party things like the African highway wiki suggests rather than you're an idiot for using living street in an African village. 

I don't have a magic supply of validators but if you find one be nice to them and grab them for your project day one.  Two months into the project cleaning up all the mistakes that have taken place when new mappers weren't corrected early is a hard slog for a validator.

If you want project numbers that support this approach email me separately.

Thanks John

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