[Talk-us] Why does the USA currently lag in OSM map quality?

Clifford Snow clifford at snowandsnow.us
Wed Feb 18 00:18:20 UTC 2015


On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 11:15 AM, Ian Dees <ian.dees at gmail.com> wrote:

> It's easy and fun to hypothesize about why OSM is crummy in the US, but
> it's vastly more useful to think of ways to improve it.
>
> Increasing awareness through mapping parties/events seems to help a lot in
> urbanized areas, but we still haven't figured out how to apply that to the
> rest of the country. Tools like MapRoulette and fixme can guide existing
> mappers to areas that are probably in need of help. Are there methods of
> remote sensing (street-level imagery, data from other places on the
> internet) that could help us with the locality problem?
>
> Any other ideas for how to make the rural US better?
>

Ian,
Thanks for suggesting we look at what we can do to improve rural US rather
than focus on how "bad" it appears.

One of the goals our Seattle Meetup Group is to "build community." We
believe that many more mappers are needed. As one of our team says, it's
all about mapping what you know. We want people that take an interest in
their neighborhood, by watching edits in their area and encourage new
mappers. That's seems to be working for us, although slowly, in the city.
But it doesn't help much for rural areas. I like the suggestion of State
Fairs. Other organizations we might want to look at are the Boy Scouts,
Girl Scouts and 4F. I've been wanting to hold a meetup in rural Western
Washington State. But haven't figured out a good way to get publicity to
attract new mappers.

Publicity of what OSM is accomplishing would be good. I wonder how we make
that happen? Do we have writers in our midst that would like to take on
that challenge? If so what story do we want to tell?

Clifford

-- 
@osm_seattle
osm_seattle.snowandsnow.us
OpenStreetMap: Maps with a human touch
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