[Imports] Special training needed for imports? Re: Import Plan for Buildings & Address in Washington, DC, USA

[Serge Wroclawski]

Alex,

That's a great question.

Since Paul hasn't responded yet, I'll speculate that his question is
asking about the training process, which is similar to the questions
that we in NYC had about Seattle's training process.

I remember having an online meeting with you, some other NYC locals
and Clifford Snow from Seattle where we discussed their training
process.

I'm guessing that the remote mappers that you hired also had a
training session similar to what you came out with for the locals?


Also, these are going to be largely people who are new at OSM, as
well as the import, so I'm guessing that Paul is curious about what
kind of training they'll get around OSM concepts regarding objects
(nodes, ways, relations), tagging, changeset creation.

Generally in a more community oriented setting, these issues of
training sort themselves out- people don't edit much when they begin
editing OSM, and people generally watch the area where they live and
take some action when they see newbie mistakes. For example, if I see
a newbie error, I'll often fix the problem and then send the user a
message welcoming them to the project, praising their new
contributions, and use the error as a teaching opportunity- so
pointing it out without trying to shame them, pointing out locals who
might help them, talking about my availability to answer questions,
etc.


When it comes to someone doing a large import, things are a lot
tougher. When errors are introduced, they don't come in dribs and
drabs, but in quantities of thousand, or tens of thousands, which
changes the scope of the problem from a small teaching moment to now
being something that needs to be corrected, and correction is more
time consuming and more difficult.

There's also another aspect to training, which is that ideally we
want not just data entry people, but real community members. We want
people who will have a sense of pride about OSM, who will have a
sense of community pride.

Maybe that's asking a lot out of training, but it's certainly
something that can be emphasized.

I think that these are the questions that Paul is asking, and if he's
not asking those questions, I guess I will.

- Serge