[OSM-talk] Some thoughts against remote mapping

[Pierre Béland]

Hi Simon
There are projects that can contribute in various ways to the development of OpenStreetMap.  Any of these add a piece and contribute to make a complete, accurate map.
Imports are important to provide structured informations like boundaries, place names, etc. Surely not something to neglect. The same with the remote mapping.  This help cover large areas, adding roads and buildings. But this does not either make a complete map. This is what I call the black and white map.
And yes local knowledge is adding color to the map. This is essential to develop better maps.  But should we accept statements saying that this is colonialism, western views to contribute to map in development countries?
This is not my perception coordinating over the last years to the various OSM responses including Hayian/Philippines, Ebola, Nepal and many others. At the same time, some of us have developped expertise and are supporting the local communities. We are a global community exchanging through internet and it is important to develop the thrust, to learn how to work together.
With the humanitarian responses, we have the opportunity to work together and develop this thrust and learn how to work together. I was pleased to see for the Nepal Earthquake response that I could co-lead with the Kathmandu Living Labs folks. They where working in quite difficult context and surely needed help. We have organized rapidly various working groups to deal with imagery, imports, validations, etc. plus interfacing with the international community. Manning Sambale from Philippines has also given back after we helped his community for the Hayian cyclone in 2013. Our colleagues from Africa, India, south America and surely elsewhere also contributed organizing various mapathons. 

As you pointed out,  we had to adjust for the Nepal response to the massive contribution of new contributors in a few weeks.  We have never seen that. There was more then 7,000 contributors and 17 million objects in 7 weeks. This is more then for the West Africa Ebola over a year. The first week, there was an average of 1,000 contributors a day.

This is the ransom of success for OSM,  being exposed to the medias, the international organizations recognizing our significant contribution to such humanitarian responses.
The answer to this is global. We should surely not let each community alone. The global OSM community needs to offer expertise to the national communities, to support them, help them manage for their contry adding significant informations to the map. 
Crowdsourcing is an OpenStreetMap reality.  There is not only the mapathons. Anybody can open an account and contribute, whatever are there skills. We like to say that we have more then 2 million contributors. But yes, a lot contribute only once. How can we assure that their experience will be fun and that they will come for a second day? 

Operations like for Nepal help see where we should improve collectively to produce better maps. The Tasking manager offers ways to coordinate the remote mapping. But we realize that we need to adapt it to the less experienced contributors. Reserving tasks for more experienced contributors for Nepal was not enough since any new contributor can select these tasks anyway. We are looking at ways to improve that, to assure that new contributors are better oriented to adapted learning material and easier tasks.
We could also pursue this reflexion with our Editors. Are they sufficiently adapted, the learning material easily accessible and adapted for the first contributors, the presets simplified, all of this assuring the new contributors will come back a second day? And this either for remote mapping or local mapping! 

regard 
Pierre 

      De : Simon Poole <simon at poole.ch>
 À : Kate Chapman <kate at maploser.com> 
Cc : osm <talk at openstreetmap.org> 
 Envoyé le : Lundi 15 juin 2015 15h39
 Objet : Re: [OSM-talk] Some thoughts against remote mapping
   

Kate

I could go in to great lengths to define what the core mappers are,
perhaps the 5% that provide 95% of the data or the 10'000 that could
easily map the equivalent of a MM-mapping party on their own in an
afternoon and so on.

But that is not the point, Robert was claiming that the remote part of
MM was designed to address 'the Western "core" of OSM contributors'. His
words, not mine, and clearly, from the first events on, that was not the
case, regardless of definition.

Everything is geared towards churning through newbies and generating as
much as possible media coverage, not fast, efficient and quality
coverage of the areas in question. It may have not been intended so from
the very start, but that is definitely what it has turned out to be. I'm
sure it is a big boon for the involved organisations in any case.

Everybody can do more or less do what they please in OSM which naturally
includes MM, but just so I don't have to like everything and I do
reserve myself the right to call a spade a spade.

To end on a positive note: the team from HOT working on the activations
in the wake of the Nepal earthquake had to come to grips with the
reality that using disasters as a newbie recruiting events is perhaps
not such a good idea and after a considerable number of issues labelled
a lot of the tasks explicitly for experienced mappers which is likely
the way it should be.

Simon
  
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