[Talk-us] Contacting non-responders with less than a month to go

[Toby Murray]

Well, this has been brought up before but with less than a month left
to go before the license change I thought it was worth talking about
again.

Since December I have been steadily contacting mappers. I started out
covering Kansas and have had great success here. Since mid February,
myself and others have been working on contacting the non-responders
with the most edits in our respective countries, with some
coordination and help from Simon Poole.

All told, I have attempted contact with about 90 people here in the
US. So far I have managed to get through to just over half and every
one of them has accepted the new terms.

However... As great as that is, it's still barely a drop in the
bucket. My overall 50% contact rate has required a non-trivial amount
of effort involving google, twitter, facebook, linkedIn, youtube, etc
as well as a few (sometimes slightly awkward) telephone conversations.
"Hi, this is the Internet. I'm calling for your son." However I have
found that a good 25-30% of people respond after nothing but a
personal message through the OSM message system. Obviously this means
that their registered email address is still valid and they see the
notification email. This also means that they should have seen the
messages from OSMF a couple of months ago but people are lazy,
forgetful and have over-zealous spam filters.

So everyone on this list, please take another look around your
city/state using the available tools[1] and just start sending
messages. You can easily spit out 10 messages in under an hour.

I would suggest coming up with your own text that you feel comfortable
with. It doesn't have to be fancy. We're just trying to get eyeballs
on the target. I usually put something location specific in the
subject line to try and get their attention and let them know this
isn't an automatic email. Something like "Your map edits in <city>"
seems to work.

For the body I say that I noticed that they were active in OSM a
couple of years ago and thank them for their contribution. Then I
point out that since they haven't been active, they may not be aware
of the upcoming license change which requires a response from all
users and that we need their permission to carry their edits forward
into the new license and ask them to log in to their account and
review the new terms.

That's all you need.

And as a bonus, some of them might start mapping again! Fewer than I
had hoped... but better than nothing.

And finally, there are two non-responders here in the US that I
haven't been able to find much on and was wondering if anyone else
happens to know any details about them. They haven't been active since
before I created my account so I thought maybe some other long-time
users might know something that I don't. If anyone has any personal
information it would probably be best to send it directly to me and
not the list. Or I guess try to contact them yourself. The user names
are:
kyrbyboy with edits New Jersey
Sunny with edits in Seattle, Denver and Beijing.

[1]
http://tools.geofabrik.de/osmi/?view=wtfe
(click on highlighted things to see user names of decliners/non-responders)
http://cleanmap.poole.ch/?layers=00B0
(hold CTRL and draw a box to get a list of people in the area with
dirty objects)
http://yosmhm.neis-one.org/
(to see where they have edited)

Toby