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

Fri Mar 4 12:09:26 UTC 2016

I’d like to support what John is saying. The process that he describes has made a huge difference in the MSF / Missing Maps TM projects I am managing (and we are hugely grateful to those validators).

We have applied this to physical events and, thanks to the hard work of Ralph (RAytoun) and Nick (Tallguy), our validator trainers at the London mapathons, we are seeing more and more experienced mappers gaining confidence in, and enthusiasm for, validating. They validate the newbies’ work at mapathons in real time and, anecdotally, I think this has led to an increase in the quality of the data contributed, but also to the learning experience of those mappers. I would encourage anyone running mapping parties to have validators in the room if they are available – for us it has been invaluable.

Cheers,

Pete

Pete Masters
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MSF UK
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From: john whelan [mailto:jwhelan0112 at gmail.com]
Sent: 04 March 2016 11:43
To: Russell Deffner
Cc: hot at openstreetmap.org
Subject: Re: [HOT] Comment to HOT project managers about getting your project completed

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<mailto: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<mailto:jwhelan0112 at gmail.com>]
Sent: Thursday, March 03, 2016 5:36 PM
To: hot at openstreetmap.org<mailto: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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