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

[Simon Poole]

No, I'm not going to tell you who to vote for in the elections :-).

However I believe there is some substantial misunderstanding of the
numbers involved.

Martijn noted in his manifesto that the daily editors numbers was flat
for the US and Michael used that as one of the corner points in his
diary post. However the daily editor number is the slowest growing
metric for OSM in general increasing from roughly 2000/day to 3000/day
since 2012, compared to that the growth in the US since 2012 is from
roughly 100 to 250 and there is no indication that it is stagnating at
all. In comparison the same metric has been flat in D-A-CH over the same
period. IMHO I don't see any indications that this is a real issue, it
is likely more a result of partial exhaustion of some of the well mapped
areas.

Now Martijn is correct in focusing on contributor growth in that the US
community is relatively speaking substantially smaller that say D-A-CH
and is still falling behind (new mappers last 7 days  D-A-CH 266, US
229, population D-A-CH roughly 1/3 of the US). Note: community still
growing substantially in D-A-CH despite the stagnating daily editor metric.

But the thing to take away from the above is that the US is nowhere near
saturation and there's plenty of room for improvement and if anything,
the numbers indicate that you are slowly digging yourself out of the
TIGER hole.

Now as how to facilitate growth, I don't have a recipe. Matter of fact I
tend to be a bit fatalistic about it, in that I don't believe the
underlying trend can be directly influenced at all, it is trivial to
create blips but over time they vanish in the noise.

I would however side with Andy in that what does seem to have some
lasting effect is constant news coverage. Vastly overrated in that
respect are mapping parties which are great as a fun focal point for the
community, but are hopeless at any measurable increase in new mappers.

Simon

PS: I do admit that I had to chuckle at the realisation in some of the
manifestos that SOTM-US size was/is a self-inflicted rat race.





-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 473 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-us/attachments/20151014/58c58108/attachment.sig>