[HOT] NB: Organised Editing Guidelines | Re: Final Request: Volunteers Needed for Global Mapathons!

Mikel Maron mikel.maron at gmail.com
Thu Mar 28 15:06:26 UTC 2019


Felix I agree with that approach. If it needs to be in the wiki, then automated ways to create that archive makes sense.
Rebecca, I think those activities are critical. My perspective is that someone in HOT needs to be primarily responsible for looking after data, quality and adherence and consistency to tagging practices, making sure documentation is in order, and that HOT aligns with OSM community practices. I think we’ve had an assumption that best practice in OSM pervades everything and everyone, and that this all will just happen. But HOT is such a scale of operation and growth, data needs to be looked as an enterprise wide asset. In government this role is sometimes called a Chief Data Officer. Similar to a CTO / Tech Director who has an organization wide vision strategy and operation for the development of the tech stack.
Mikel

On Thursday, March 28, 2019, 10:41 AM, Felix Delattre <felix.delattre at hotosm.org> wrote:

 Hola, 
  Yes, I think it was one of the concerns of the creators of the revised guidelines to assure that the scattered information on project's websites like Missing Maps and  companies' blogs finds a way back to OpenStreetMap's infrastructure.
  
  The Tasking Manager is probably the software that is used for most organised editing efforts. And a lot of the information required by the Organised Editing Guidelines is already present in the projects' descriptions and database of the TM. There the idea emerged that the TM could (automatically) report back to OpenStreetMap. This would make it much easier to comply with the guidelines. Me too, I don't think the wiki is a good place for managing this. Following the idea of automated reporting through the TM, and estimating the amount of projects created on all instances, I know of, I'm not sure, whether we want the wiki to have thousands of entries every year and I actually don't know if automated feeding would work. 
  However I understand the value to store reporting on organised editing activities on OSMF's side and in one central repository. I just doubt a bit about the technology proposed to be used.
  Some conversation around that has started here, and I invite people to participate https://github.com/hotosm/tasking-manager/issues/1373 
  Thanks,
 Felix
  
  On 3/28/19 2:16 PM, Rebecca Firth wrote:
  
 
  Hiya, 
  Just to follow up on this, the mapathons will be supporting Missing Maps projects. Validation activities to support the mapathons are already planned for the following week, as well as other activities such as training and this effort to find local experienced mappers who are interested in supporting the mapathons and providing additional OSM expertise & also contributing to improving quality. 
  Missing Maps groups are very aware of OEG but are still working on how best to create documentation to fit best with both OEG suggestions and practicality. Much of this information is presently available in slightly different forms (such as the events list on the Missing Maps website), which need to be linked to/synthesized differently to fit with OEG. For additional information, HOT-specific work in progress towards the OEG is available at: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Organised_Editing/Activities/Humanitarian_OpenStreetMap_Team 
  Thanks, 
  Rebecca  
  
   
  On Wed, Mar 27, 2019 at 8:59 PM Vao Matua <vaomatua at gmail.com> wrote:
  
 Mikel et al, 
  I agree that we need to change the way we do mapathons, the credibility of HOT and OSM is at risk. I have observed some characteristics about the OSM mapping through HOT tasks being done by mapathons, primarily ones done by corporate sponsors. It appears that often these efforts are not well led, or at least not led by individuals that have a good level of OSM experience and skills. The results are that very common mistakes and errors are created. 1) The instructions are not followed, nor even apparently read. 2) Individuals assume that a tile must be completely mapped and will add features that are not called for in the instructions such as landuse or highways. 3) The tagging of features is not done based on OSM guidance, for example a path in Tanzania is often tagged as "motorway", "primary", "secondary" or other type of highway. 4) Additional tags are added without local knowledge such as railroads, traffic cameras, and businesses that are not apparent from imagery. 5) Using iD with the default image (Bing) without changing the background image leads people to mark a tile as "bad imagery" when the Digital Globe or Esri imagery in that location is fine.
  6) Sometimes mappers will assume that OSM is a game like Sim City or Minecraft and create their own imaginary features 7) One characteristic of many of these mappers is an apparent hurried to try to finish a tile. The buildings are over-generalized by either combining buildings, creating polygons much larger than the actual building, often the shapes are very crude and are not carefully formed with right angles, many buildings are skipped or overlooked, many are overlapping with other buildings or roads, and in many cases create self-intersecting polygons 8) Once a mapper starts with these bad habits the habits are picked up by others working at the same time which expands the problems 9) It appears that after a small number of edit sessions the mappers from these efforts do not continue with other HOT tasks, and presumably go a way thinking they have done their feel-good-humanitarian-service. 
  The net result of these mapathons is that rather than contributing to the completion of mapping in an area, there is actually more work required to clean up the messes than there would have been to properly trace the features from scratch. I do not believe this is a validation issue, but is an issue with leadership. The individual organizing the event for the corporation or group may have little or no OSM experience, and have been giving the task of setting up the mapathon  and do not have the skills or expertise to help newbie mappers.  I also have seen people that claim to have OSM experience or skills often are very inexperienced and have very slight exposure, There is a  lot to learn about OSM, and we do ourselves a disservice by saying that it's easy and anyone can do it. We should be happy to teach people, but I don't believe any of us doesn't have more to learn. I have led several corporate mapathons in person and remotely, they are hard work. The same can be said for tertiary school effort. 
  Perhaps HOT should establish a test or a vetting process for potential mapathon leaders? 
 Emmor 
   
  On Wed, Mar 27, 2019 at 2:06 PM Mikel Maron <mikel.maron at gmail.com> wrote:
  
  Important to note the guidelines are suggestions not enforced requirements of the OSMF. More on that in the blog post 
 https://blog.openstreetmap.org/2019/02/09/organised-editing-guidelines/  
  My opinion is master list of mapathons is a very good idea. I don’t think the wiki is best system suited to be the place for that primary list. Another tool could mirror to the wiki for archiving purposes. 
  I agree with Pierre. Data quality needs to become a primary focus of these and other mapping activities asap. Otherwise it’s not valuable experience for those present or everyone else working with OSM data. I think that will take more than trend, but a substantial direct investment by HOT, Missing Maps and others in systematically operationalizing data quality improvements across through training, monitoring, etc.
 
 Mikel
 
On Wednesday, March 27, 2019, 11:22 AM, Pierre Béland via HOT <hot at openstreetmap.org> wrote:
 
     Shoud I insist, we also need a new trend where such projects take responsability to produce quality data.  Badly, too often, this is not what we observe.  For the Ebola response in North Kivu, the coordinators, we had to restart the mapping of Butembo in december since  the data produced by newbies was so imprecise, so incomplete. 
  Adequate training material and mapathon procedures need to be developped for Live data monitoring, interaction with newbies, and correct immediately quality problems. 
   
 Pierre 
   
  
       Le mercredi 27 mars 2019 10 h 40 min 07 s HAE, Rory McCann <rory at technomancy.org> a écrit :  
  
   The OSM community & Foundation has recently adopted the Organised
 Editing Guidelines, to guide events like this. The community wants to
 help you make this a successful mapathon.
 
 In emails like this, and in accordance with the OEG, you should link to
 the wiki page(s) describing your mapathon.
 
 https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Organised_Editing_Guidelines
 
 https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Organised_Editing/Activities
 
 
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                 Rebecca Firth Director, Community & Partnerships rebecca.firth at hotosm.org @RebeccaFirthy 
  Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team Using OpenStreetMap for Humanitarian Response & Economic Development web | twitter | facebook | donate 
                  
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