[HOT] Progression, Re: Mapping buildings with new mappers at a maperthon

[Donal Hunt]

I can share my experience with running events at my previous employer (a
large multinational) as part of their CSR efforts…

We ran a number of events over a few months and did indeed have some repeat
attendees (I didn't get round to validating the numbers but the data was
there I believe). Since the majority of people had never touched OSM or any
GIS tools before most people needed to learn what to do (we used a slide
deck with examples that we adjusted based on feedback at each session) and
then start mapping (baby steps).

The sessions were setup in what I would consider an ultra-social setup. One
of the benefits was that people from different teams got to meet and
interact outside of normal day-to-day activities. Having individuals that
had already attended a session was super helpful for covering off the
simple questions that new contributors always have. We actively  encouraged
people to first ask others on their table and then ask the leaders of the
event.

This was super helpful because it frees up the leaders to be able to
check-in with each table / group and verify that their quality was
acceptable and address any issues that were cropping up. If we saw a trend
(e.g. people struggling with particular types of buildings) we would stop
the mapathon, grab everyone's attention, cover the specific issue on the
big presentation screen and then let everyone got back to their task.

The intent before I left was to have most events be focused on new /
irregular contributors while running the odd event for people who had a
deep interest in contributing at a higher level. This would have covered
things like using JOSM, validating your work as you go, validating others'
work, etc.

Worth noting that our primary KPI was engagement (rather than anything
mapping related) though that could change over time once the effort was
more established internally at the company. So we also did some 45-minute
mapswipe events (setup and start-up time is tiny) which attracted both
casual contributors and regulars. For others looking to attract continued
engagement over the long-term, running short map-swipe events is a great
way for people to get a taste of how their contributions help (we used to
highlight the different types of mapping contributions as part of the
presentation at the start of each session).

My sense of things is that if you got 1 person who contributed at the
highest level for every 100 event attendees, you would be doing well. For
HOT, it may be worth gathering some data from various groups to see if that
ratio varies based on the group type (corporate events vs opendata events
vs charity events,etc). I suspect that having a regular schedule for events
probably plays a factor too.

Hope the insight is useful.

Donal

On 18 Nov 2017 08:40, "Bjoern Hassler" <bjohas+mw at gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear friends,
>
> Not in direct response to John, but on a tangent.
>
> Do people who organise mapathons have a sense of how many people come
> again vs. those who only come once? Do you have specific strategies to
> encourage people to come back?
>
> Do you have a plan for progression moving people onto JOSM, or as John
> suggests starting some/all on JOSM? Then moving people to validation?
>
> Would be interested to hear!
> Bjoern
>
> On Sat, 18 Nov 2017 at 00:20, john whelan <jwhelan0112 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 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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>
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