[Talk-us] Operation Cowboy - Preaparing Thank you gift

[Matthias Meißer]

Am 29.11.2012 00:04, schrieb Richard Fairhurst:
> !i! wrote:
>> Hi, one last personal note on the mapathon and a big thank you
>> (literally): http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/!i!/diary/18132
>
> And thank you, too. I've always been sceptical about this sort of event - my
> vision for OSM is that we need more contributors with local knowledge, not
> more "remote mapping" - but in hindsight I think this, and MapRoulette, are
> showing some really interesting ways forward. By applying the OSM community
> to a problem in Mechanical Turk fashion, we're able to achieve much better
> results than an unthinking import or automated edit would do.

I absolutely agree with that opinion. What OSM makes strong is a huge 
crowd of people _on the ground_, that contribute and update data.
On the other hand, there are still a lot of countries, where we sadly 
haven't this public attention and only a few inhabitant participate on 
our project. So what we can do here is to wait, till there is a critical 
number of mappers, or try to help from outside.

Similar to Richard (and others) I was sceptical, too if armchair-mapping 
will work with such an general mission. So first approach (night of the 
living maps) was focused on contribute on a semi-local level, where 
people have usually no problem with identifying objects, ...
So OPC2012 was the next step, to see if it will work on another 
continents, as well and get feedback by the community. And it seemed to 
work, even if some users would prefer to work on their own regions again ;)


I had similar concerns to do tracings here in my state of Mecklenburg 
Vorpommern (in north east Germany). As this is a wide area with only 
sparse community, I wasn't sure if it will be bad (as to 'steal' the 
work from other upcoming local mappers) or good idea to trace places 
100km away.
But it turned out, that most externals enjoyed to see their city with 
buildings (usually a giant batch job that frightens people) and attract 
them to add more minor changes as adding POIs they now can easily point 
to. A few dozen times, it worked, too , to invite inhabitants (local 
bureaus, associations, sport clubs, ...) to add their knowledge using 
osmbugs.org.
That doesn't have to be a general effort, but was my personal motivation 
to see armchair mapping more positive.

So what else can be done to attract people? I don't think that we have 
so much choices:
-get into media (IT, GIS, ...)
-get into usual apps
-offer better/more innovative services than other
-allow even minor places to get as detailed, as boom towns

The first idea needs some storys (as OPC2012 might was) and doesn't work 
without new or innovative facts, so new developments. Here in Germany it 
seems to be now a problem, as anybody from the IT sector seems to know 
OSM, but only very few from the mainstream. So maybe here we might need 
really to focus on the "consumers" to recruit a few more of them as mappers.

-Erfahrungen vom ländlichen Raum in Ostdeutschland
-Wie Leute gewinnen?
-hier breiter bewerben, da OSM zwar bei IT Leuten bekannt, aber kaum bei 
Normalsterblichen
-man weis immer nur sehr wenig von anderen teilen der Erde
-Mapper sind gewissenhafter als man denkt. Es scheint nur den wenigsten 
um Masse statt Klasse zu gehen
>
> Give the OSM community a task and it will carry it out much better than
> you'd imagine. There's lots we can learn from that.

Yes most mappers (as you and me) seem to care more on quality and 
quantity. Maybe this is because everybody knows mapping from a lot of 
different perspectives (local survey , mapping well know areas, .... 
editing existing 3rd party data).

Personally I saw that we all have very limited knowledge from other 
parts of this world :)

bye,
Matthias