[Moderation] Welcome to the first 20 subscribers!

[Dave F.]

Hi

Like some have posted here my first reason is slightly non-altruistic, 
in wanting to protect my data.

Although I agree that systems are needed to revert data, I believe the 
best way to reduce vandalism/cock-ups etc is to bolt the door before the 
horse has fled, which is why I agree with points raised below by Brian.

For point 2 something like a Top Ten of Do's & Don't's  issued on 
sign-up might be appropriate, or a once a month auto post to newbies?

One concern of mine is specifying what an act of vandalism is. For 
example the 'bot called Bugbuster that's doing the rounds. From what 
it's edited of my data I can see no vandalism, just correcting my 
errors. Some claim he's done damage on which I can't comment, but from 
his forums posts he seems adamant he's done nothing wrong.

Cheers
Dave F.


Brian Prangle wrote:
> 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
>
>
>
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