[Talk-us] Growing OSM (was OpenStreetMap US elections: October 12 townhall with candidates)
Harald Kliems
kliems at gmail.com
Wed Oct 14 19:34:05 UTC 2015
One example I encountered yesterday: A bike friend posted a link to
http://gravelmap.com/ on Facebook. It's a website where people collect the
unpaved roads that have become increasingly popular in the US cycling
community. The GravelMap slippy map is Google Maps, and I'm assuming their
data is also stored using some sort of Google infrastructure. This seems
like a prime candidate for collaborating with an existing community. Of
course the first response when I mentioned OSM was: "OSM surface data is
totally incomplete. Google MapMaker already has the surface data, so we're
better off using that."
Harald (who started mapping when he still lived in Germany, where free (as
in beer and speech) maps were much harder to come by than in the US)
On Wed, Oct 14, 2015 at 2:18 PM Marc Gemis <marc.gemis at gmail.com> wrote:
> After 11 editions of "Mapper of the Month" in Belgium and number 12
> coming, we see that almost all people started mapping because they are
> coming for from Open Source/Data communities or because the other map
> solutions are lacking for their needs.
>
> They need a map for hiking, cycling, etc. and the commercial providers do
> not give them that.
> The map from the commercial providers is not updated fast enough.
> There are features (POIs, amenities) that are not available on the maps of
> commercial providers, examples: AEDs, bread vending machines,
> historical/listed buildings.
>
> Perhaps the maps of the commercial providers fulfil the needs of the US
> users better in those areas ? If not, why not contacting the communities
> for which those commercial map are not sufficient ? Isn't that more
> efficient than PR-message to the "whole" world ?
>
> Do we really understand why OSM is popular in e.g. Germany and the UK ?
> Are those reasons applicable in the USA as well, or why not ?
>
> regards
>
> m
>
> On Wed, Oct 14, 2015 at 7:16 PM, Andy Townsend <ajt1047 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On 14/10/2015 16:21, Steve Coast wrote:
>>
>>> (snipped)
>>>
>>> What we’ve tried so far:
>>>
>>> * SOTM getting bigger every year
>>> * We tried paid ambassadors at CloudMade, running mapping parties with
>>> some success but the timeframe was very long to see people turn in to
>>> editors.
>>> * We've tried making the web editor nicer multiple times (potlatch,
>>> mapzen, iD etc) and that doesn’t lead to meaningful growth in editors.
>>> * Mapping parties appear to have some traction, but take a long time
>>> * Getting schools involved appears to work briefly, then everyone goes
>>> home or to the next class
>>> * Competitions to map areas (google also tried this for mapmaker)
>>>
>>
>> From a UK perspective, what _definitely_ increases the short-term signup
>> rate is any sort of national press coverage. Re social meetups, I don't
>> know whether any of other the local groups can report differently, but in
>> the East Midlands of England although we get a few OSM-curious people
>> coming along I don't think we've seen any new "heavy mappers" coming into
>> the project that way; people just stumble across the project somehow and
>> sometimes stick around.
>>
>> The rough analysis I did ages ago (in Italy I think) didn't suggest that
>> local "welcome messages" had an effect on retention (over the couple of
>> months that I looked at the data). It didn't look at mapping quality
>> though; maybe there was an effect there.
>>
>> I suspect that "trying to be nice to newbies" has an effect (though I've
>> no idea how you'd measure that independently of other variables) and I also
>> suspect that "making the web editor nicer" has an effect too, but that
>> can't really be measured independently either.
>>
>> So I'd suggest just "get lots of press where the OpenStreetMap name is
>> used" and "be really helpful to the new mappers who show up, no matter how
>> many unwritten rules they break with their first edits"*.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Andy
>>
>> * It's worth mentioning that most "comments to new mappers" _are_ really
>> polite and helpful (see http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/osm-discussions ).
>>
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