[Osmf-talk] Idea for improved mapping system

[Christopher Beddow]

1. Yes, I understand the problems around incentive. So I would say a good
way of thought is to look at how to really take the stats like Pascal has
visualized and make them into a more fun categorization, but careful to
avoid steering users toward wanting to map for the stats.

2. Aside from that, I wonder if we can agree that we should have a goal as
an international community of growing the contributor base. In my opinion
this is a great goal, but carrying out any actions toward this goal should
be in the hands of local communities, such as chapters or affiliated groups
on either a city level (like let's say Polimappers in Milan area) or a
regional level (such as OSM LATAM who may be best to engage more users in a
country in that region where there are few who are active, or who don't
have a country chapter even informally).

3. What is suggested as an actually responsible, effective, and at least
theoretically proven way to recruit serious and dedicated users? Can we
know ahead of time who will develop a real care and passion for OSM?

4. What are, inversely, the most risky things we can do or have done, which
are rather proven to result in vandalism, poor edits, extremely short
user-lifespans, and therefore detract from the community despite any short
term contribution? Gamification was mentioned here but it would be good to
re examine specific cases for people like me that don't remember or weren't
involved at that time.



On Mon, Oct 19, 2020, 15:05 Rory McCann <rory at technomancy.org> wrote:

> Yes, remember that not everything that counts is counted, and not
> everything that's counted counts.
>
> It's OK IMO to have something fun & silly. A UK site showing politican's
> record in Parliament alongside the number of words the politican spoke,
> also showed how often they used alliteration, or rhymes. They did that to
> remind people that these stats shouldn't be taken as gospel.
>
> If you do something like this, be careful. If you incentivise people to do
> something and it backfires, people will rightly hold *you* responsible.
>
> The recent problems with Hacktoberfest has shown how rewarding people for
> metrics  *can* backfire.
>
> On Sun, 18 Oct 2020, at 5:13 PM, Frederik Ramm wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > On 10/18/20 01:49, TheAdventurer64 wrote:
> > > A user and I were talking about implementing a system for better
> > > mapping, as described here:
> > > https://osmus.slack.com/archives/C029HV951/p1602968516431900
> >
> > Please, in the future be so kind and summarize the idea in your e-mail
> > rather than pointing to a proprietary web page that requires
> registration.
> >
> > I have not read it but I can guess from the responses here what your
> > idea entails, and I would like to offer a word of caution:
> >
> > Gamification is a powerful tool, and with wielding it comes great
> > responsibility. Most attempts at gamification in the OSM sphere have
> > either had lasting negative effects or at the very least massive
> > teething issues. People *will* game the system. If you count how many
> > changesets they make, then they will split their edits in smaller
> > chunks. If you count how many objects they change, they will be more
> > likely to move a complete road with all its nodes by 10 centimetres or
> > write a script to drop the "created_by" tag on thousands of objects. If
> > you count how long their changeset comments are, they will write and
> > repeat novels when uploading changesets. If you count how many new
> > objects someone creates, then they will be more likely to delete and
> > recreate something than to just improve its geometry.
> >
> > The direction that gamification drives people in will never be exactly
> > what we want and need in OSM, it will always be off by something. You
> > will not be recruiting new mappers, but new players.
> >
> > It can still be beneficial to OSM, but the above needs to be kept in
> > mind if you want to build something that succeeds.
> >
> > On another ("diversity") note, you should be careful not to focus too
> > much on competitive elements and players who want to climb some ladder;
> > you might end up motivating people from some regions and genders much
> > more than others.
> >
> > Bye
> > Frederik
> >
> > --
> > Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > osmf-talk mailing list
> > osmf-talk at openstreetmap.org
> > https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/osmf-talk
> >
>
> _______________________________________________
> osmf-talk mailing list
> osmf-talk at openstreetmap.org
> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/osmf-talk
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/osmf-talk/attachments/20201019/0a6ed6ae/attachment.htm>