Welcoming new mappers

TLDR: It’s now super easy to welcome new mappers in your country or region. Just post an issue at the Welcome tool repository, and we’ll set you up. New mappers will be listed and in a few clicks you can check their work and welcome them with a localized welcome message. You can share the workload, as it will be clear who is and who hasn’t been contacted. Try it out at https://welcome.osm.be/ (don’t forget to connect your OSM account). Instructions on how to request your region available here.

About the tool

Back when we started doing real life meetings in Belgium, one of the first frustrations was how hard it was to get in touch with mappers. How do you let mappers know there’s a group of locals who are eager to get to know them? And how do we offer a helping hand to new mappers?

Of course, the first thing you think about is automating, plugging in to the global OSM software. But that software evolves slowly and you’d have to come up with a solution that works worldwide from the start.

So we decided to go for a simple solution: Belgian mapper M!dgard built a simple tool in PHP around Pascal Neis’s RSS feed of new mappers. M!dgard never stopped hating the ugly coding, but it did do the job for several years - with Jakka doing most of the welcoming work.

Don’t expect welcoming new mappers to be very rewarding. Most new mappers are never going to stick around, so just a few percent will ever answer you. Statistically speaking, there doesn’t seem to be an impact on mapper retention either. But we always felt that it does help people to find their way in the documentation and in the communication channels. Not in the least, we used the tool to monitor the edits of new mappers. That helped us spot errors as well as occasional vandalism.

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Every year during State of the Map, starting in 2016, there has been a Local Chapters Congress session where representatives and members of Local Chapters that have been recognised by the Foundation and other local mapping communities meet together to talk about experiences and challenges in starting, building up, and growing enthusiastic local communities of OSM mappers.

Due to the pandemic, we unfortunately could not hold the Local Chapters Congress this year during the virtual State of the Map 2020 last July. However, the Local Chapters and Communities Working Group, or LCCWG, has decided to push through with a separate virtual event at the end of this year’s OSM Geography Awareness Week! (Trivia: the LCCWG was in fact formed as a result of the Local Chapters Congress 2019.)

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The Local Chapters and Communities Working Group (LCCWG) is the OpenStreetMap Foundation’s newest working group and it was established in September 2019 following the annual Local Chapters Congress at State of the Map 2019. Since its establishment, the working group has now grown to 10 members spread over 4 continents as can be seen on the map below.

Location of the members of the LCCWG. Base map © Stamen Design, CC BY 3.0 with map data by OSM contributors.

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With the Local Chapters & Communities Working group (part of the OSMF), we did a quick review of the websites of all the official Local Chapters. This is quite interesting, as these sites all have basically the same mission - and still are hugely diverse.

All of these website focus on helping mappers find the community and/or to help outsiders understand what OSM is all about. Maybe surprisingly, none of these websites are map-centered. On some of them, it’s hard or even impossible to find an interactive map. There’s several creative attempts to build the content around a map - especially the Czech website is quite succesful at that.

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