[OSM-talk] Proposal: New Working Group "Welcome WG"

Paweł Paprota ppawel at fastmail.fm
Tue Oct 2 22:21:55 BST 2012


Hi Richard,

I read the proposal and to be honest I'm not sure about the hypothesis
("Early contact increases mapper engagement"). For me it would seem kind
of creepy if a website that I've just registered and done something on
contacted me personally saying "You've added a restaurant".

I think that the general purpose is great - get to know mappers, why
they decide to leave the project etc. but I would say that messaging
people is not a good way to achieve that. It's just too... personal.

I would much prefer (as a user - not a new user - but remembering my
first changesets :-) that this kind of goals are achieved through good
website and editing usability, context-relevant help and some kind of
tutorials. So in the above example, there would be a message on the
website saying "Did you know that you can add the address?" instead of
someone contacting the user and asking them...

I have seen several new people's reactions to OSM editing tools,
usability and documentation and to say that they were confused is to put
it lightly... One person was surprised when I redirected them to OSM
forums - "there are forums???".

So in general I am inclined to agree with what Andy said in this thread
already - OSM tools and documentation are hard to understand and as he
put it "writing stuff that's easy to use is really, really, hard." and I
agree 100% with that statement.

Perhaps the Welcome Working Group could borrow something from the (now
defunct?) User Experience Working Group's mission statement:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Foundation/User_Experience_Working_Group

After all, osm.org is the common denominator for all newcomers - they
all have to go through it, this is their first contact with the project
so I imagine that things like user-friendliness, clean user interface
often make or break new mappers.

Paweł



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