[OSM-talk] missing maps? no: missing GPS traces.

[Mario Frasca]

Hi everyone.

mapping Santa Fé, Veraguas, Panamá.  allegedly, a "strategic tourist 
attraction" for this country, but what's the strategy, I'm at odds 
understanding that.  anyhow.  I'm trying to convince the municipality to 
help me helping them, and my plan is to: (step 1) collect traces, (step 
2) process them together with local input and bing aerial pictures and 
integrate the information into OSM, (optional step 3) produce a nice 
large format map that makes the effort visible to people not using osm.org.

the "collect traces" step is where I'm most perplexed.  I've been 
walking around, travelling by local transport, uploaded the traces to 
OSM and my perplexity is how come aren't there any but really truly any 
other traces than what I've uploaded the last few weeks, and one by some 
German guy in 2009.

no, wait, I'm not just complaining for the sake of it, I'm looking for 
opportunities.

you see, we are in 2020, and people still do not know OSM even exists.  
just count them: we have 1.35 billion people walking with a handheld 
device, most of which with a GPS, and only 10 thousand installations of 
OSM Tracker for Android.  that's a really negligible percentage, 
homeopathic almost.

I opened an issue on the osmtracker-android github project, and I invite 
you to contribute ideas there.

https://github.com/labexp/osmtracker-android/issues/234

my ideal scenery would be: one arrives at an airport, or a bus terminal, 
and notices a poster advertising a 'minimal controls' osm tracker, with 
a QR code to download it.  installation is followed by opening it, and 
the program suggests creating an OSM account, and some default options 
for uploading traces.  then the process would be automatic: you start 
recording, you stop recording and at that moment the program asks "do 
you want to upload this to OSM?"  (now this option is hidden behind a 
long-press, and is followed by the not-yet-solved need to register on 
OSM.  let me tell you: casual users stop here.)

Mario