Did you notice any pattern in which editor was used? I did a quick search of my state without one hit.

Clifford

Did you notice any pattern in which editor was used? I did a quick search of my state without one hit.

Clifford

Great research.

My welcome program initially targeted just mappers in an area that could likely attend an OSM Mapping Party. Starting this year, I’ve expanded it to state wide. The next step is to create a survey for new users. A survey would give us their perception against the hard data that you reported.

At some point we need to find a better method of welcoming new users.

Clifford

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

OSM really needs to survey mappers to better understand them. We could then working on improving process and tools, conversely, not change a process or tools when it’s actually working. Unfortunately we have this aversion to contacting users through any mass mailings.

I would really like to automate the welcoming of new mappers in my area. Right now it means watching for newbie when their make their edit. It’s not hard, but time consuming.

Nice work! Great to see all that activity.

If anyone has an iPhone, have them check out GoMap!! While I don’t have an iPhone, I’ve used the app. It’s easy to learn and use. Much like iD.

Clifford AKA Glassman

Seattle, WA, USA

Does the Dutch community manually send messages or is there some automatic way that I haven’t discovered?

Thanks for sharing and your 10 year commitment to OSM.

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

I’m looking forward to trying out your code.

Thanks for sharing, Clifford

Martijn, This tools has some great potential. I can’t wait to try it out on some of my county data. Many of the surrounding counties publish new data monthly which means it is better than Census TIGER data.

I did a similar process using PostGIS to match by highway names. The problem is so many ways are unnamed. It looks like Cygnus solves this problem.

We can use all the help with can get. There has got to be something better.

Nice fixes. I really like the statistics for the way. Still false positives, but not sure software could be improved anymore. I’m finding two types of false positives, ferry terminals and apartment service roads. At the Clinton Ferry in WA State, people don’t drive in the correct lane as they drive onto the ferry. If they did you’d see two way traffic. The apartment service roads just have small amount of traffic. Might be just one person going out/in the same way each time.

One suggestions - please have the orange circle updated as well when the way is either marked as fixed or invalid, similar to Missing Roads.

Seattle has a very active open source geo community. While most are not regular OSM contributors they do participate in project such as our Seattle buildings and address import. More recently we held a HOT mapathon for Nepal. We had a large turnout of GIS professions plus some students. I often provide the quote, for every one hundred people we introduce to OSM, one becomes an active contributor. Of course I pulled that number from thin air, but it feels right.

So while we have an active community in Seattle, it’s not typical of the rest of the US. Looking at Washington State, most of the editors are concentrated around the Seattle metropolitan area. The Eastern and Western part of the state need more mappers. My guess is that is true of much of the US. We are OK in big cities but could use more contributors in rural parts of the country.

It’s hard to compare Seattle to Belgium. Our Meetup is mostly people from our county which has about 2M people in 6,000 km2 compared to 1.8M people in 1,600 km² if we look at just Brussels.

Lately I’ve noticed a number of new mappers that are concentrating on hiking paths. We have some great trails in Washington. If you seen the movie, Wild, the Pacific Crest Trails goes through the state. As far as I know, our meetup group had nothing to do with their interest.

We are trying to get cyclist involved. Seattle has an active cycling community; it is rated in the top 5 nationwide. A couple of us have tentatively been invited to do a presentation at their annual gathering in 2016. Mapillary has offered some bike mounts that we can give away.

Vision

Creating a vision is more than just having a Board meeting to brainstorm vision statements. It involves listening to stakeholders, doing surveys, testing ideals, and getting feedback. Did any of that occur in Seattle? Is there any documentation?

Our vision should challenging. The vision will help us set broad goals, such as increase gender diversity, addressing, or substantially increase the number of active mappers. Let’s give those goals to the community to find ways to accomplish them. OSMF could help fund those goals

Having goals doesn’t impact the mapper that just wants to map their neighborhood. It might mean better tools to help map.

Address

Addresses have a place in OSM. They should be one of our key features much like roads. In some locations, ie. the US, addressing is much easier. Others, such as some Latin American countries, addresses, as we know them, don’t exist. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t attempt to find a solution.

Are you sure it is Melbourne Canada? Cout it be Melbourne Australia?

Great improvement. It would be nice to capture number of clicks on “Improve this map” link. It should give us some useful intelligence, such as the percentage clicking on the link and trend charts.

Clifford

What a great tool. Thanks!!!

Great to see someone else interested in mapping our National Parks. Most likely there are many people involved, we just don’t hear from them.

Take a look at WikiProject US National Parks. The wiki page is a place where we can document tools available to help map the parks. I would appreciate it if you could add your findings about the NPMap team to the page. There is also a link to a NPS icon to OSM tag. It has many holes. Plus we need to get some new tags approved for use. For example ranger station. While we could use some existing tag, it wouldn’t all that clear. And hopefully we can use this as a resource to get more people involved.

I was also thinking of proposing to the US community a Mapping Party of parks on June 1-2. This would coincide with the National Day of Civic Hacking.

I’m hoping I can count on your help. I can be reached directly at clifford at snowandsnow.us

Clifford AKA Glassman

Let me know if you need help manually fixing the nodes. Can I suggest a smaller test next time?

Also, I have a list of businesses for the downtown area. Would be nice if we could work together to add know business to the buildings.

Clifford aka Glassman