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

[john whelan]

It doesn't work for fast large scale projects as you mention, you need more
validators but for more average sized projects it works well.  Even on the
larger faster projects you often see a team approach to validation.  You
get to recognise mappers who map and validate, if you don't recognise the
name you look their experience up then cast an eye over the work if they
don't seem experineced.  You need to keep on top of the recently mapped
tiles, at least twice a day validating, so its a fair bit of work on the
validation side but by catching the mistakes early on you save a chunk of
work later on.

This is looking at validation not so much as something the project managers
do later on but more as problem prevention and often problem prevention is
cheaper than problem sorting out.  Besides it gets more tiles out of the
mappers by making them feel more involved.

Cheerio John

On 3 March 2016 at 21:30, Russell Deffner <russell.deffner at hotosm.org>
wrote:

> 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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