[Moderation] Welcome to the first 20 subscribers!

[Brian Prangle]

Hi everyone

My aim in joining this group is like several of you have already mentioned -
I've invested a lot of time in mapping Birmingham and the West Midlands and
I want ot be able to protect this investment. Most of the contributions so
far have concentrated on the technical aspects of reversion tools, sandboxes
etc. I think we need to see some discussion about the social aspects of
protecting our data.

So here are my thoughts:

1. One of the problems seems to be we are reliant on a small number of
dedicated mappers who just can't cope with re-editing data - hence the
current reliance on reversion tools.   "Given enough eyeballs all bugs are
shallow"-  if we hade more mappers then this needn't be such a problem. I'd
like to know who's  trying to promote  OSM into local community
organisations which could prove a rich source of local interest and
datawatching and protection - sort of like a digital neighbourhood watch
2. We should draft a welcome email with a few guidelines to new users as
they sign up - this shouldn't be too onerous a task to implement (perhaps we
already do this - can't remember what I got when i signed up)
3. New users are tipped in at the deep end and only have the newbies list
for assistance - couldn't we setup some kind of buddy system going where
veteran mappers take on a group (say 5-10) novice mappers and initiate them
for say a period of 8 weeks and then take on another batch? If we got a 100
volunteers to do this we'd be guiding 500-1000 new mappers and maybe we
wouldn't get such a high dropout rate and inadvertent data errors.

It's very much the long haul approach and doesn't directly address issues
such as liam123 has caused where we will need technical tools, but I feel we
need to start discussing this if we are to attract and keep and manage the
average mapper and not become a small community of uber-geeks

Regards

Brian
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/moderation/attachments/20091001/c559def2/attachment.html>