[HOT] Mapping buildings with new mappers at a maperthon

john whelan jwhelan0112 at gmail.com
Sat Nov 18 00:18:21 UTC 2017


I'm not a great person for maperthons, the last one I attended could have
gone a little smoother, there was a time delay before mapping.  They were
mapping buildings and highways and although they were mapping for some time
no tiles were completed.

Recently there was another one locally which I drifted down to and I did
the patter.  I took two laptops with JOSM preinstalled and set them up.

As new mappers came in I just asked them to sit down at the laptops and
start mapping with the building tool.  Then we set up their laptops with
JOSM and they continued on their own machines installing JOSM, I think one
needed to download JAVA and I had JOSM an a DVD.  They then continued
mapping.  We had them mapping their first building within minutes.  The big
delay was setting up an OSM account and logging into the task manager.

12-15 people registered we had six mappers eventually, four were new to
JOSM.  They mapped buildings quite quickly and I guarantee all were square,
all were correctly tagged and none were more than six inches out of place.
Most were spot on in Bing.  Tiles were completed and not just ones without
buildings in them we deliberately pointed them to tiles that had a fair
number of buildings in them.

As they mapped they became more adventurous in drawing two squares on an L
shaped building and joining them together.  We knew that one section was a
caravan park so the mapper explored the tags and found
building=static_caravan and was delighted to find they could select all the
static_caravans and retag them all at once.

One new mapper was a teacher so since we had a very experienced iD mapper
there after she had been mapping in JOSM for a period of time I got him to
show her how to map in iD.  Her comment was not so complex to set up in
that you didn't need to start JOSM first but per building it was more mouse
clicks involved and more to remember.

I don't know if the group of mappers we had was small enough we could give
them a bit more one on one or they were just exceptionally good new
mappers.  They all had Windows machines to work on.

I do know that Jo has had some similar results going directly to JOSM for
new mappers.

It does look as if going JOSM and the building_tool plugin is a viable
route for new mappers mapping buildings in maperthons.  Both the quantity
per mapper and the data quality of the mapped buildings was high.

Cheerio John
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