[Imports] How good can an import be?

[steggink at steggink.org]

Quoting Nic Roets <nroets at gmail.com>:

> On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 4:04 PM, Richard Weait <richard at weait.com> wrote:
>> As another, single point of comparison of communities, consider local
>> OSM groups.
>> http://usergroups.openstreetmap.de/
>>
>> There appears to be a local OSM user group for each
>> 100 Million USA-ians.
>> And one for each 10 Million Canadians.
>> And one for each 2 Million Germans.
>>
>> The USA got imports early.
>> Canada got imports a bit later.
>> Imports seem much less popular in Germany.
>>
>> Correlation? Causation?  I don't know.
>
> Let's compare the USA with the Netherlands:
> Both had imports of the complete road network. Yet the ratio of users
> registered on the wiki to population is one in 2 million and one in
> one hundred thousand respectively.
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Category:Users_in_United_States
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Category:Users_in_the_Netherlands
>

Maybe it's dangerous to say, but I think that the growth of the Dutch  
community has been negatively affected due to the AND import. The  
scale of the Netherlands is not comparable to the US and Canada, and I  
think it would have been feasible to have the road network in the  
country mapped completely one or two years ago. As a result, the Dutch  
community is relatively small, compared to the UK and Germany. Not  
that many OSM related events are being organized, and those who are  
organized often have a low turnout.

In Canada this would be nearly impossible. I've done a lot of mapping  
there myself, before the Geobase dataset became available (end of  
2008). This was in a region (province of Quebec) which already had low  
community activity. I don't think Geobase and Canvec has a negative  
effect, but despite these datasets available and being imported, the  
community seems to grow over the last few years. Of course it is up to  
the importers (me being one of them) to learn from past mistakes, and  
take utmost care and listen to other users while importing the data.