[Talk-ca] OSM and Open Data Imports - Chicago Experience

Jonathan Brown jonabrow at gmail.com
Fri Nov 2 22:06:09 UTC 2018


Stirling Quinn pointed out this presentation on the topic of imports by Ian Dees and need for input on tagging from OSM global community, not just the local OSM community. He also covers licensing issue and misrepresentation of city should the data be used incorrectly. He “harassed” Chief Data Officer until the city adopted MIT license for the city’s open data and posted their open data in Github stripped of personal information (e.g., name of building owner). He talks about how it is now much easier with the building import for OSM mappers to geocode and the community became a lot stronger for testing civic apps (see 66 page document co-authored by Chicago OSM map users and users at CutGroup#6:OpenStreetMap Editor http://www.smartchicagocollaborative.org/cutgroup-6-openstreetmap-editor/ that helped bridge the gap between OSM developers and open data community in Chicago – a direct result of his importing open city data and engaging the user community. Being on Github and resolving issues by making poll requests is an interesting process despite the large size of the datasets. 

Jonathan 

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Today's Topics:

   1. Re: Enablers and Barriers for Voluntary Participation in
      Crowdsourcing Platforms (Jonathan Brown)
   2. Re: Enablers and Barriers for Voluntary Participation in
      Crowdsourcing Platforms (John Whelan)
   3. Re: Enablers and Barriers for Voluntary Participation in
      Crowdsourcing Platforms (OSM Volunteer stevea)
   4. Re: Enablers and Barriers for Voluntary Participation in
      Crowdsourcing Platforms (Pierre Béland)


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Message: 1
Date: Fri, 2 Nov 2018 11:28:03 -0400
From: Jonathan Brown <jonabrow at gmail.com>
To: "talk-ca at openstreetmap.org" <talk-ca at openstreetmap.org>
Subject: Re: [Talk-ca] Enablers and Barriers for Voluntary
	Participation in Crowdsourcing Platforms
Message-ID: <5bdc6d05.1c69fb81.5a176.d131 at mx.google.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

Apropos the ongoing efforts to educate new volunteers, the discussion section of this research paper on enablers and barriers may be useful https://ac.els-cdn.com/S0747563216305295/1-s2.0-S0747563216305295-main.pdf?_tid=31ea73b8-7cb4-4eca-acc4-062aa79c278b&acdnat=1541171937_ecb61791a7d798a1491503b71f69b0ab 

Jonathan 

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Message: 2
Date: Fri, 2 Nov 2018 12:31:35 -0400
From: John Whelan <jwhelan0112 at gmail.com>
To: Jonathan Brown <jonabrow at gmail.com>
Cc: "talk-ca at openstreetmap.org" <talk-ca at openstreetmap.org>
Subject: Re: [Talk-ca] Enablers and Barriers for Voluntary
	Participation in Crowdsourcing Platforms
Message-ID: <c9264e23-f845-6253-df7c-45b0089f4cf7 at gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"; Format="flowed"

My feeling is OpenStreetMap has two sides. The first is local adding 
local knowledge to the map.  The other I'll call armchair mapping.  When 
Stats Canada did the pilot it tapped the local Ottawa mappers who meet 
physically.

I would agree that amongst mappers with the most edits there is a high 
number of retired people and those with disabilities involved and these 
may not be visible.  Tapping them for groups coming together to map can 
be a problem.

In my view typically the most productive mappers are those with a 
special interest.  Adding WiFi access or churches for example or even a 
change of street name.

We also have a number of teachers who would like to use OSM and in 
particular the building project to involve their students.  We get a 
fair amount of data added but the quality can be questionable.  HOT and 
others I think have found that using a restricted set of tasks and tags 
works best.

My personal feeling is giving feedback is useful.  So the challenge for 
the building project is how to engage people.  What are the most useful 
tags to add?

I'd suggest some sort of web site giving the number of buildings mapped 
and the tags that have been added by city.  Graphs with time as one axis 
would be nice.

Certainly certain activities are more complex than others.  Importing 
buildings is not a task I'd suggest for teenage mapper with twenty 
minutes experience.  Breaking out the tasks is a task in itself and for 
4 million buildings I think it could benefit from a project plan.

I think we've seen with the 2020 project that just saying it would be 
nice to have by is not really enough to sustain it but who would do it 
I'm not sure.

Cheerio John


Jonathan Brown wrote on 2018-11-02 11:28 AM:
>
> Apropos the ongoing efforts to educate new volunteers, the discussion 
> section of this research paper on enablers and barriers may be useful 
> https://ac.els-cdn.com/S0747563216305295/1-s2.0-S0747563216305295-main.pdf?_tid=31ea73b8-7cb4-4eca-acc4-062aa79c278b&acdnat=1541171937_ecb61791a7d798a1491503b71f69b0ab 
>
>
> Jonathan
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Talk-ca mailing list
> Talk-ca at openstreetmap.org
> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-ca

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Message: 3
Date: Fri, 2 Nov 2018 10:45:24 -0700
From: OSM Volunteer stevea <steveaOSM at softworkers.com>
To: John Whelan <jwhelan0112 at gmail.com>, Jonathan Brown
	<jonabrow at gmail.com>, talk-ca <talk-ca at openstreetmap.org>
Subject: Re: [Talk-ca] Enablers and Barriers for Voluntary
	Participation in Crowdsourcing Platforms
Message-ID: <23BD397C-41DB-43B3-A578-8CA563FED107 at softworkers.com>
Content-Type: text/plain;	charset=us-ascii

On Nov 2, 2018, at 9:31 AM, John Whelan <jwhelan0112 at gmail.com> wrote:
> My feeling is OpenStreetMap has two sides.  The first is local adding local knowledge to the map.  The other I'll call armchair mapping.  When Stats Canada did the pilot it tapped the local Ottawa mappers who meet physically.

Speaking from nearly a decade of experience, OSM has many, many sides, though the two that John Whelan identifies are two many find "readily apparent."  I quick-read the study, which was actually quite informative in that it broke up similar crowdsourcing efforts (OSM is only lightly mentioned) into demographic categories, with some surprising results.  One is that many volunteers are older, sometimes disabled (stroke victims noting benefits of "repetitious tasks which help my brain to heal" was cited) and have a particular need for the sorts of social feedback which projects like this uniquely offer.  (At the same time, there is often a sharp dichotomy between these sorts of crowdsourced projects and social media, with many in the study who prefer the former appearing loathe to use the latter).

Another very important take-away is how participants in projects like these truly improve their skill-sets (seriously improving quality of submitted data) over time:  like many things, the longer one participates, the better become their skills.  This emphasizes the importance of "growing experts," something seldom mentioned in OSM.

> I would agree that amongst mappers with the most edits there is a high number of retired people and those with disabilities involved and these may not be visible.  Tapping them for groups coming together to map can be a problem.

It might appear that way (that they are invisible), yet there is no denying that "they find you."  In short, "build a project that attracts older, likely high-skill (or can grow there) participants, and they will come."

> In my view typically the most productive mappers are those with a special interest.  Adding WiFi access or churches for example or even a change of street name.

While it is difficult to say why mappers become productive, it may be even harder to do the apparently more simple task of defining "productive."  I know one mapper who flits about the entire planet in OSM, seeking to "up his stats on a leaderboard" as he measures the number of edits he makes in the tens or hundreds of thousands.  Needless to say, the quality of his edits, and how productive he is, is a matter of contention.  There is such a thing as "high quality" and in OSM this can and should be defined and refined especially for major projects.

Certainly "quality of data entered" is one metric, yet even that can be hard to define or measure, unless strict criteria are established at the beginning of a project as a goal to strive.  Once again, and especially in highly ambitious projects (like BC2020) this underscores the need for some up-front planning, up-front project management, up-front expectations of data quality and up-front documentation of all of these things so that these expectations are met and measured along the way.  (Project Management 101, really).

> We also have a number of teachers who would like to use OSM and in particular the building project to involve their students.  We get a fair amount of data added but the quality can be questionable.  HOT and others I think have found that using a restricted set of tasks and tags works best.

I personally have experienced helping professors at the university level (computer science, environmental studies...) use OSM, as students at the undergraduate level readily take to OSM.  Younger students (high school, middle school) enjoy some success with it, more often at smaller, less ambitious tasks, a recently popular one in the USA being "micro-mapping our local school campus."  (Drinking fountains/water stations, extremely detailed sporting facilities, footways and associated potential routing, landscaping, restricted/off-limits areas, parking areas for autos, motorcycles, bicycles, etc.)  What often works is breaking students into functional groups (sports facilities, transportation, amenities...) and having a teacher/administrator check the results of each group.  The tags can start out restricted and stay that way, or they can start out restricted and allow the students to develop further "depth" by researching OSM's wiki pages, or even (yes, this is advanced) structure their own scheme.  For example, a high school has four different libraries in several different buildings, or extensive sports facilities, how might we best tag these?

And whether young, old or in-between, Martijn van Exel (an OSM superstar) has proven with his (well, largely his) MapRoulette project that "gamification" can really super-charge particular kinds of data entry/improvement sub-projects like few other strategies can.  The Study confirms this, saying "Platform features such as gamification, quizzes and podcasts are frequently cited as key enablers for many crowdsourcing campaigns."  (Reed, Raddick, Lardner & Carney, 2013).

Another important aspect is intra-project communication, which in OSM's case are things like wiki, talk- mailing lists such as this one, our forum to ask questions and get answers, the built-in volunteer-to-volunteer "missive" system allowing short messages to be exchanged and so on.  A dangerous trend in OSM has been towards "walled gardens" such as social media and tools like Slack, which are proprietary and I (and others) have characterized as "secret-sauce walkie-talkies."  OSM doesn't benefit by those nor this trend and should avoid anything but open platforms for intra-project communication.

> My personal feeling is giving feedback is useful.  So the challenge for the building project is how to engage people.  What are the most useful tags to add?

The Study stresses the importance of feedback.  I agree this is an important component of any crowdsourced project and In OSM one of the most successful aspects of this is the near-immediacy with which the data recently entered get rendered (assuming the data included tags which DO get rendered, not all do).  Identifying "useful" tags is part "what are the most important data this project attempts to GET entered?" and part "how often and frequently-updated are these data displayed after they ARE entered?"  And a Tasking Manager should be part of that for "more major" projects.

> I'd suggest some sort of web site giving the number of buildings mapped and the tags that have been added by city.  Graphs with time as one axis would be nice.

While the study doesn't exactly say this about OSM, I'll offer that it is my FIRM experience that using visual media like a map with blocks on it that show color-coded progress (as Tasking Manager does) not only "stays within" the geographic theme of mapping ("using a map to show how much we've mapped"), it also is MUCH more visually appealing than graphs, tables or text-oriented data, especially as these need to be scrolled or otherwise interacted with via mouse/keyboard/other input device.  One map, already displayed, with nothing else needed except to look at it and "visually parse" what it is conveying, really works well, perhaps even "works best."  I have no hard data with which to back that up, but I do have much personal experience that this is true.

> Certainly certain activities are more complex than others.  Importing buildings is not a task I'd suggest for teenage mapper with twenty minutes experience.  Breaking out the tasks is a task in itself and for 4 million buildings I think it could benefit from a project plan.

It will not simply "benefit" from a project plan, something as ambitious as a national building project of the sort BC2020 aspires to be absolutely, positively requires a project plan.  I'm pretty sure the experiences we've had here speak volumes about that.

> I think we've seen with the 2020 project that just saying it would be nice to have by is not really enough to sustain it but who would do it I'm not sure.

The initial approach of having federal government's imprimatur doesn't seem to have worked out as it might have, but that doesn't mean it can't or shouldn't play a role, I believe it can and likely should.  It might make sense for something like a STATSCAN or provincial-level agencies "acting as conductor," knowing best their data, crucially understanding how OSM has its own methodologies for receiving data, and finding the "best blend" of making that happen, publishing/promulgating a project plan for that to be crowdsourced in an OSM-sensitive way, then largely stepping aside and letting the crowd do our thing, likely offering (minor) "mid-course correction" if/as needed.  This can and does work, though it frequently benefits from identifying highly dedicated and high-skills leadership within the crowd and directly supporting these (usually quite few) people, enabling them with the ability to slightly modify rules, offer seminars/educational curricula or even direct towards them carefully-identified financial support to facilitate completion of the task.  There are many, many flavors of how this can happen, and it can often be most useful to allow it to become "home grown" along the way, but with some firm planning up-front to make sure it doesn't go awry (contingency plans, worst-case-scenario anticipation...are crucial).

That's plenty for now!

SteveA
California


------------------------------

Message: 4
Date: Fri, 2 Nov 2018 18:58:38 +0000 (UTC)
From: Pierre Béland <pierzenh at yahoo.fr>
To: Jonathan Brown <jonabrow at gmail.com>, John Whelan
	<jwhelan0112 at gmail.com>
Cc: "talk-ca at openstreetmap.org" <talk-ca at openstreetmap.org>
Subject: Re: [Talk-ca] Enablers and Barriers for Voluntary
	Participation in Crowdsourcing Platforms
Message-ID: <1422576018.31961405.1541185118160 at mail.yahoo.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

Bonjour John
Tu as vu avec moi lors de coordination de Réponses humanitaires majeures  telles Ebola en 2014 et le Népal en 2015 l'arrivée de plus en plus de mapathons notamment organisés par MissingMaps.  Les flux constants de nouveaux arrivés qui viennent pour quelques heures s'initier à OSM, ajoutent beaucoup de problèmes difficiles ensuite à gérer. Et on l'a aussi vu oui avec le projet B2020.  Ceux qui proposent de démarrer de nouveaux projets d'import doivent doivent être prêt à consacrer beaucoup de temps  à la coordination et accepter toutes les frustrations et difficultés. Difficile de contrôler tous les groupes scolaires ou autres qui veulent participer mais de façon non suffisamment planifiée et structurée.  Bien intéressant pour une classe de s'initier à OSM. Mais comment assurer que OSM bénificiera de cette expérience?

Pour un bon tableau de suivi, il ne faut pas uniquement des nombres d'objets ajoutés. Il faut aussi des indicateurs de qualité tel que l'indicateur sur les géométries irrégulières que j'ai développé récemment. On y voit les projets où un nombre anormal de bâtiments sont tracés avec des formes irrégulières. Mes analyses montrent que les statistiques pour une ville ne devrait montrer en général que des ratios en 5 et 10% d'immeubles avec des formes irrégulières.  Pour un projet en Ouganda, j'ai observé un ratio de près de 60%. Évidemment, lorsque l'on analyse de plus près, beaucoup d'erreurs qui risquent de ne jamais être corrigées.
voir 
fr  https://opendatalabrdc.github.io/Blog/#!index_fr.mden https://opendatalabrdc.github.io/Blog/#!index_en.md





 Pierre 
 

    Le vendredi 2 novembre 2018 12 h 31 min 59 s HAE, John Whelan <jwhelan0112 at gmail.com> a écrit :  
 
 My feeling is OpenStreetMap has two sides.  The first is local adding local knowledge to the map.  The other I'll call armchair mapping.  When Stats Canada did the pilot it tapped the local Ottawa mappers who meet physically.

I would agree that amongst mappers with the most edits there is a high number of retired people and those with disabilities involved and these may not be visible.  Tapping them for groups coming together to map can be a problem.

In my view typically the most productive mappers are those with a special interest.  Adding WiFi access or churches for example or even a change of street name.

We also have a number of teachers who would like to use OSM and in particular the building project to involve their students.  We get a fair amount of data added but the quality can be questionable.  HOT and others I think have found that using a restricted set of tasks and tags works best.

My personal feeling is giving feedback is useful.  So the challenge for the building project is how to engage people.  What are the most useful tags to add?

I'd suggest some sort of web site giving the number of buildings mapped and the tags that have been added by city.  Graphs with time as one axis would be nice.

Certainly certain activities are more complex than others.  Importing buildings is not a task I'd suggest for teenage mapper with twenty minutes experience.  Breaking out the tasks is a task in itself and for 4 million buildings I think it could benefit from a project plan.

I think we've seen with the 2020 project that just saying it would be nice to have by is not really enough to sustain it but who would do it I'm not sure.

Cheerio John


Jonathan Brown wrote on 2018-11-02 11:28 AM:



Apropos the ongoing efforts to educate new volunteers, the discussion section of this research paper on enablers and barriers may be useful https://ac.els-cdn.com/S0747563216305295/1-s2.0-S0747563216305295-main.pdf?_tid=31ea73b8-7cb4-4eca-acc4-062aa79c278b&acdnat=1541171937_ecb61791a7d798a1491503b71f69b0ab 

 

Jonathan 

 

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