[OSM-talk] online survey about the OSM community

[john whelan]

Looking at what they are doing I'd say the information being dug out will
be of value to the OSM community and help us understand a little more about
the people who add value to the maps.  It might even help us on the
retention rate and bring the experience of the average mapper up a little.
It's also being done fairly professionally and running something like this
properly costs money, at least its not OSM money.

In an ideal world the way to get a proper random sample would be to select
OSM mappers randomly then message them.  Hopefully you'd get better than
90% response rate to keep it statistically meaningful.

Reality is you might be lucky to obtain a 2% response.  So the next best
thing is OSM-talk and hopefully he'll get the 1,000 responses which he
needs to make it statistically meaningful.  He didn't get that many
responses from the OSM-talk message.  OSM-talk is bias in that we don't
have that many average mappers here, the national OSM mailing lists have
more so it makes sense to make the request to a larger audience.

OSM is difficult in that it crosses so many cultural boundaries but in this
case I think the cross posting was reasonable to obtain the desired number
of respondents.

How would you suggest he obtained a large enough random sample?

Thanks

Cheerio John


On 23 August 2014 06:05, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> > If you are at least 18 years of age and speak English,
>
> [...]
>
> The same message has meanwhile been posted to a whole lot of national
> OSM mailing lists, with an additional "** apologies for cross-posting
> **" at the top.
>
> If you know it is something that you shouldn't be doing, then sticking
> an upfront apology at the top doesn't cut it really. This is impolite,
> and disrespectful.
>
> Bye
> Frederik
>
> --
> Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"
>
> _______________________________________________
> talk mailing list
> talk at openstreetmap.org
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>
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