[OSM-talk] The power of the crowd

[Peter Miller]

I was pondering last week the fact that OSM now has almost exactly 15,000
registered users and that the Ordnance Survey has a total of 1,500 staff. Ok
so the OS guys turn up for work every day and are all focused on the UK and
have all the best gear and most of our registered users don't do a lot, but
OSM has ten times the number of surveyors and many folk at the OS are not
surveying anyway! Wow.

 

Also, I was looking at the growth rate of registered users on OSM. It took
131 days for the number of OSM mappers to double from 7,500 to 15,000. The
average doubling time since the project had about 900 registered users has
been some 172 days which means that the number of users is going up by about
a factor of four each year.

 

At a typical urban mapping rate of 500 population per hour per user, these
15,000 users can map at the rate of 7million population per hour. In a year
when we have four times the number of users it will be 28million population
per hour!

 

Overall, possibly Steve is not going to be far off with his prediction of
having the UK finished in June 2008!

 

 

The table below shows the doubling time to date, and projections based on
the average doubling rate to date. Of course better and easier to use tools
will increase the uptake and the productivity.

 

 

 


28 November 2005

900

 


01 May 2006

1,875

154


30 October 2006

3,750

182


11 June 2007

7,500

224


20 October 2007

15,000

131


 

 

 


09 April 2008

30,000

172


28 September 2008

60,000

172


19 March 2009

120,000

172

 

 

Regards,

 

 

 

 

Peter

 

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