[Talk-us] OpenStreetMap US elections: October 12 townhall with candidates

Wolfgang Zenker wolfgang at lyxys.ka.sub.org
Wed Oct 14 17:33:20 UTC 2015


* Steve Coast <steve at asklater.com> [151014 17:21]:
> [..]
> A more interesting question is what should OSMFUS try to do to build editors in the US, and what metric should we use (presumably active editor headcount)?

> What we’ve tried so far:
> [..]
> It feels like we should try some different things (ideas?) on a per-state basis. For example, we run 100 mapping parties in Idaho and we engage 100 schools in Tennessee and so on so there’s distance between them and we can really measure the effectiveness of anything.

> Some ideas to try:
> [..]

Thanks for steering this discussion in the direction of possible
improvements. To add a bit to Steves ideas:

I suggest to focus on the rural parts of the US instead of big cities
for a while. These are usually neglected by "the other map", looking
there shows better geometry then OSM but the same crappy, typo-infested
and incomplete TIGER based road names that we have, which tells me that
they never really looked at the area. And IMHO rural areas are where
you can win "hearts and minds" of the american people.

One idea would be to have a mapping party doing TIGER fixup for one
rural county, then contact the local newspaper, write an article what
has been done and ask for help regarding wrong/incomplete road names,
wrong data caused by outdated imagery, etc.
My guess would be that newspapers in rural towns would be happy about
every article regarding their local area that they can get.

What I noticed in many years of doing TIGER fixup in Montana is that
TIGER data in reservations is even worse than the already bad data in
other rural areas. Maybe organising mapping parties together with e.g.
a local mission inside a reservation, or working with the BIA?

Wolfgang



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