[Talk-us] Community Involvement

[Thea Clay]

I totally agree with the idea of a group working together on improving how-to documents and the beginners guide. I would love to help since I volunteered to work on this project at SOTM in Girona.

 I have been working on a few general guides and tutorials for new mappers, how to's for hosting events and video tutorials for editing with Mapzen. Most of the documents are specific to outreach projects I've been working but they could very easily be made more universal. --- And of course getting easy to understand tutorials for the two most popular editors (JOSM and Potlatch) are probably the most important tools for a newbie. Mine are pitiful so say the least.

After spending a week or so combing through the wiki and other help docs I think there are quite a few very useful how to's already out there, they are just dispersed and could use revision. I would hate to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Maybe a good first step would be to gather all the material that has been created and fill in the gaps from there. I went ahead a created a wiki page so people who have documents already created can contribute them to the process and where the group can work on putting the new stuff together. Here is the link: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Draft_Documentation_and_Guides.

I personally feel that the group working on this should be as open as possible and that the document should not be 'locked'. Things change so quickly in OSM that I would hate to have outdated resources or put up barriers to people who want to contribute in this fashion. But that's just my opinion. I also have no attachment to using the wiki as our home base, it just seemed like the most inclusive and easiest way to proceed at this point.

It might also be nice to get some mappers from non-English speaking communities involved. I am sure there is great stuff out there written in German, French, et al.

Best,
Thea
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