[Strategic] Fw: [ppgis] RE: Collaborative slum mapping initiative with Google Map maker kicks off

[Kai Krueger]

On 04/27/2011 04:00 PM, Frederik Ramm wrote:
> I have gone on record saying that as long as we have a healthy growth, 
> maybe we should just cherish and nourish that, knowing that we'll 
> conquer the world eventually - and knowing that a humane growth rate 
> also allows our infrastructure to grow with demand. - I agree that if 
> we saw the numbers of active users stagnating we'd have to look for 
> reasons, bus as long as our only problem is that we're not growing as 
> fast as some people would like, I'm not sure I see the problem. But 
> Kai will certainly fill us in on statistics ;)
Indeed I will. :-) And I am sure we can discuss and devise more 
statistics if necessary to support one case or the other.

Looking at http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Stats we haven't reached 
the numbers of active users we once had in mid to late 2009. So in some 
sense, OSM's editing community hasn't grown anymore at all for the last 
1 1/2 years. Now we can argue a lot about slops and statistics and how 
to calculate change points, but I think it is pretty clear that the 
growth rates of active users are down a lot since about mid to the end 
of 2009, to the point where it is arguable to talk about "active users 
stagnating".

As active users are to some degree the derivative of data, and the 
active users are at least constant the data is still growing, but it is 
a far cry off of exponential and getting closer to linear.

Less importantly, the number of people contributing gpx tracks is as low 
as in September of 2008. (But that may well be because GPS traces have 
lost their importance due to other surveying tools)

So if we ever want to "finish" mapping and have a chance of keeping data 
up to date in more than a few European countries, the growth rate has to 
imho pick up again quite significantly. It is not even clear if we would 
be able to succeed in infinite time with current levels of mappers, as 
the data might become stale faster than we can remap things.

How much of the issue of not growing the community anymore is due to 
usability vs publicity vs "what do I personally gain from contributing 
to OSM" vs "community aspects like unfriendly mailing lists" vs imports, 
I have no idea. But I think answering this question of why OSM can't 
attract more users in various countries is possibly a very important 
issue for the strategic WG. It needs to think about what kind of tools 
(e.g. surveys, feedback systems, usability testing...) OSM(F) can use to 
figure this out, and then what are the appropriate steps to alleviate 
those issues.


Kai