OpenStreetMap
I’ve been sending message to new users that are in our meetup area, inviting them to join our meetup. I also offer to answer any OSM questions they have. Since Jan 2015 I’ve sent 106 messages. From the new users, I’ve received responses from 10 new mappers. That’s a 9% response rate.
Not sure why the response rate is so low. A couple of possibilities come to mind. First, I don’t ask for a response. While I do invite them to join our Meetup Group, it is impossible to find a match between OSM user_id and Meetup nickname. Some could have responded by joining the meetup group. The other possibility is that I need a better welcome message. There is a third possibility but for now I’m not going there.
Work in progresssss
讨论
SOSM 于 2016年01月14日 10:06 的评论
9% is a impressively high response rate, better than any other result I’ve heard of.
I believe we have to be careful about our expectations
In any case even in countries with large and active OSM communities we are talking about perhaps 1% or so that really participate in the community and turn up at get togethers etc.
Simon
santamariense 于 2016年01月14日 16:45 的评论
Isn’t different from Brazil.
Alan Bragg 于 2016年01月14日 21:16 的评论
That’s great. I’d like to do something similar. I registered in 2011 but never mapped a single node and forgot about OSM. I rediscovered it in 2014 when I started mapping local trails and have become quite active. I would have welcomed a communication from a local mapper.
42429 于 2016年01月15日 19:00 的评论
When sending urgent messages to major mappers, I got a response rate of 50-60%. Only 1 of 5 has sent me a short personal message, the other ones have just pressed an OK button. 40-50% have disappeared without notice.
Some mappers have used a temporary mail address for signing up. Some mappers have forgotten their password. Some mappers don’t read every message.
A meeting of 10 mappers is a big event, even in a city with 1 million inhabitants.
Glassman 于 2016年01月15日 23:46 的评论
Thanks everyone for their comments.
If anyone is interested, I used the IRC bot to find new users after they make their first edit. Of course it would be nice to contact everyone that just signed up, but AFAIK that isn’t possible.
The 9% response rate is the people that responded to a message. The next step will be to see how active the 9% are as compared to the non-response group.
Now that I’ve moved to a more rural area, it appears that new local mappers are more responsive. Although they are few in number. I plan to start a new Meetup Group for this corner of Washington State. We’ll see if that draws in new mappers.
Clifford
RicoElectrico 于 2016年01月22日 20:28 的评论
Of course some people are that way, but in principle you shouldn’t want to be left alone - after all OSM is a social activity, with cooperation and its rules (written or non-written) shaped (and changing over time) by the community. If you want to edit, you should also socialize, at least minimally. We’re not Google Maps with faceless moderators. I think the current onboarding process (and the OSM website) doesn’t stress this enough,
marczoutendijk 于 2016年01月22日 22:18 的评论
In the Dutch community I send a welcome message to every mapper that does his/her first edit in our (small) country.
In this message I point them to a special help Wiki with informatin for newbies and encourage them to join the community.
I also check their first edits for serious mistakes/errors. A half year after this first contact I check the number of edits that were done after this initial edits to see if we are dealing with “one time only” mappers (e.g. no more edits after the initial edits) or staying mappers (more than 100 changesets after 6 months.)
On average we have 80-100 new persons (doing a first edit) each month. Based on some preliminary results and data checking, it seems that only 3% of the mappers keep mapping!
Glassman 于 2016年01月23日 01:25 的评论
Does the Dutch community manually send messages or is there some automatic way that I haven’t discovered?
!i! 于 2016年01月24日 14:19 的评论
Same for my state (Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany), with even lower return rates. But compared to usual public relation mails, this is still higher (you say 1% return is ok in promotion).
dieterdreist 于 2016年01月25日 10:22 的评论
Inspired by your post I have counted the welcome messages that I have sent out in the past 2 years (exactly 100 if I do 2 years+1week), and how many replied (expected to be in the same range as you, but now discovered a significantly higher reply rate, for this term it was 27 replies). I often did not write to everybody just because she was new though, but rather picked those people that seemed more interested than the average newbie (i.e. more than one or two edits), and in particular I did often not write to apparent business owners (who had a profile name that sounded like a business and who only added this one business). In the more recent mails I also did not invite them to face to face meetings (because we don’t do them right now). My text is like this: a welcoming paragraph, followed by a paragraph of stuff I have noticed looking at her first edits, followed by a paragraph where to find more information and help (e.g. regional and national mailing list, wiki, learnosm.org). I consider crucial the part where I comment their edits, because it shows them that it isn’t just a standard copy and paste mail, and it makes them more involved.
joost schouppe 于 2016年02月 2日 06:18 的评论
In Belgium, we send a message to every new mapper, as picked up by Pascal Neis CSS feed, archived in a Google Doc. We do check the changesets, and sometimes personalise the welcome message based on that. There is no call to answer us, just an open invitation to join the community. With about 400 messages sent, we had a response in 11% of the cases.
I do have the feeling that personalisation increases chance of feedback, but then again feedback isn’t the goal. Maybe it would be more interesting to track link clicking from the message (but that might be off putting tonsome)
BTW our welcome message is available here for copying and improving. (scroll down for Dutch, French and English versions)
Glassman 于 2016年02月 2日 06:50 的评论
That is an impressive message. I like that it is in a number of different languages. I wonder how many of our new mappers have English as a second language.
I hope you don’t mind, but I’d like to use your message to rewrite mine.
Clifford
edward17 于 2016年02月 8日 14:54 的评论
Hi!
I’m Eduard, active mapper from East of Ukraine. I also send “welcome message” to new users in my area. I find them just by veiwing OSM edits history or in RSS feed of “Latest OSM Contributors”.
I’ve sent messages to 65 users. Here’s some statistics:
I can share with you some advices that I found white communicating with new users.
I think it’s not bad :)
P. S. Unfortunately I haven’t enough time to make this activity now. So, all the text describes mostly summer of 2015. For this reason I write this comment so late.
P. P. S. I haven’t analyzed my comments to changesets, but this is also one of my ways to communicate with new users.