[Talk-GB] OSM Analysis New Data and bot

[Bob Kerr]

I agree with Andy about increasing the number of mappers is essential. With Cycle map he has increased the interest in the cycling communities. Getting interest and publicity is very difficult. I can see many other communities that we could encourage to start helping us, from NHS to golfers but we have no organised way of doing this at the moment. Using a bot to replace large sections of data in the UK is going to be counterproductive or destructive, especially as the UK is now 80% (road name)complete.  However restricting a bot by area to the size of small villages may help. I believe we can both encourage people to join us and use the a bot on small areas at the same time.

Cheers

bob


From: Andy Allan <gravitystorm at gmail.com>
To: SK53_osm at yahoo.co.uk
Cc: talk-gb at openstreetmap.org
Sent: Thursday, 9 June 2011, 16:45
Subject: Re: [Talk-GB] OSM Analysis New Data and bot

On Thu, Jun 9, 2011 at 3:42 PM, Jerry Clough : SK53 on OSM
<SK53_osm at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

> In order to get  a better level of completeness in the UK what we need are
> more mappers.

Absolutely.

Everything we do should be focussed on helping get more mappers, or
helping the mappers we have get their jobs done more easily.
Everything that is a direct substitute for having more mappers is, at
best, a distraction from (what I see as) the desired goal. If we have
mappers, and lots of them, then - as we've now demonstrated - we can
get a glorious dataset.

Note that not everyone here shares the same goals - some people are
focussed on the data, others on the community. It might be worth
examining why we (collectively) have a tendency to discuss the data
all the time and I see very few discussions on community matters.

I find in most conversations, if the answer is "because we don't have
enough mappers yet" then the solution is not to bypass them with some
form of automation but to get more of them. Unfortunately to most
OSMers, community building seems hard (which it is), and writing bots
or doing imports seems easy (which it's not).

> A bot is putting short-term gain ahead of our long-term interests.

Indeed. What's more, all the effort that goes into writing bots,
discussing them, justifying them etc is time that hasn't gone into the
primary goal of recruiting and helping more people to OSM.

Cheers,
Andy

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