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

[stevea]

Simon Poole writes:
>I would however side with Andy in that what does seem to have some
>lasting effect is constant news coverage.

Great to read this thread!

Yes, I agree.  And even YOU, too, can influence this, especially if 
you have a newsworthy bit of rah-rah to report about something 
recently completed in OSM (whether you actually did the contributing 
yourself, or you are "simply" the reporter-of-facts).  While I don't 
know what effect it had, I did publish in OSM's 
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenStreetMap_in_the_media/2013 
for September (as that is when it occurred) an article about some 
success that OSM had achieved in our United Stated Bicycle Route 
System WikiProject.  It was that Adventure Cycling Association had 
published an article in its blog, offering accolades to OSM for 
harmonizing the national bicycle network in the USA.  Leveraging the 
media is GREAT!

Similarly, when I began my efforts to better express rail in the USA 
in this forum (talk-us, December 2014), and the need to correct noisy 
TIGER rail data, this got picked up by the "wochennotiz" (I think 
that's correct).  Concomitantly, this certainly had something to do 
with the explosion of good rail updates the USA has seen over the 
last ten months:  people do read "weekly news feeds" (whether in 
German, English, discontinued, started up again, or otherwise) as 
well as "press feeds."  You just don't know when these will get 
picked up by more local press (newspapers, the news department of a 
TV station, a weekly city paper...).  However, as they do, such 
"press coverage" definitely increases the exposure of OSM to a wider 
public that may be unfamiliar with it or what the project actually 
does.  (We MAP!)  This is a rolling snowball:  it starts slow, but it 
gets bigger and bigger and bigger.

You can't expect to move boulders with the flick of your wrist.  It 
takes a nudge here, a bit of effort there, a little bit of press 
coverage over in the distance.  Keep chipping away like this, bit by 
bit, over the long-term, and it really does make a difference!  We've 
had National Public Radio coverage and other national press, and we 
can keep that momentum going if we have the right things to report at 
the right times to "feed the media."  Let's do so!

SteveA
California