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

[Martijn van Exel]

Great points in this thread. I feel more inspired than ever to work on improving the US map, whether I will be on the board or not. We have a great group of mappers in the US, it’s just way too small. 

I want to pick up on the word ‘community’ which is used differently by different people to suit their needs. When I talk about community I mean you - the folks who actually map, build the tools to enable others to map, and organize the events that mappers come to. Not companies and institutions that use OSM or are interested in doing so. 
I would be curious to hear the other candidates define community.

Suggesting that board members need to be heavy mappers is really beyond the pale and I thought we had dispensed with this notion years ago. It is sad to see it rear its head again. I have worked with a great group of people this last year and couldn’t have cared less if they had made 10 edits or 10000.

Lastly. Everyone, please do vote. It’s important we hear from you now. We can only function if we have a strong mandate from you, the mappers.

Martijn

> On Oct 14, 2015, at 1:46 PM, Simon Poole <simon at poole.ch> wrote:
> 
> 
> 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.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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