The idea really is to turn the project you mention into something global. It’ll depend on contributors and resources if this thing turns into a global service where local chapters “adopt a region” or if it will be a tool you can install for your own region.

Meanwhile, there simply is no reason to wait. It is quite simple to set up an IFTTT recipe that will send the Neis-one RSS feed of new contributors to a Google Doc. Add some nice formulas, and you have a nice spreadsheet of who started mapping, with handy links to see what they did and to a place to send a message. Here’s a bit of info. If necesary, I’m willing to expand on that, or even help you set it up for your area.

We’ve been doing this for a while now, and while it is hard to measure impact, we have had some people joining the local Meetups and the mailing list after receiving the welcome message.

@rayKiddy: a POI focused map that lets you filter just certain types of POI’s? Here are my favourites: http://www.openlinkmap.org/ http://openpoimap.org/ http://thenextis.com/

Also, http://www.Overpass-Turbo.eu . Zoom to your are of interest, hit the wizard, type “amenity=school”, hit run. Ready. When you do run into trouble, I have found that it is indeed hard if you don’t have a background. But the guys at http://help.openstreetmap.org are, well, very helpful.

Well, some friends here have been thinking about creating a map like the nice heatmaps you often see, but where the heat comes from avarage age of the nodes in the tile. And maybe also one where the ‘heat’ comes from number of different contirbutors. These maps might help to identify the kind of places you mention: a lot of data, but little movement.

Ben, I revived my old little project a couple of months ago. Ruben jumped aboard and he’s taking it to a whole new level, with the help of Polyglot. The idea is to build a little platform that collects new contributors and makes it easy to welcome them, and to follow up on what they do right and wrong. There is a call for contributors on the wiki page about the project.

I really like the way this is going. Stil would love to see an effort to include paved/unpaved at low zoom levels in a country like Argentina.

The problem with standard style being both a mappers tool and the most viewed map style for non-mappers seems to be quite recurrent. The approach of “let’s make a better looking mapper’s tool” is ok, but has it’s limitations.

It seems like for a lot of people, osm.org should showcase the full depth of mapped data. If we want to do that in a visually attractive way, we probably will need things like transparent tiled layers or more interavtively displayed themed objects. That’s a whole different project of course. But knowing that such a project is underway, might make your project a lot easier.

For the paved/unpaved rendering: I don’t see much difference between the scenarios. What I am missing though, is a view at low zoom levels.

This is very cool. Mapazonia might be interested too.

It might be interesting to differentiate between settlements, roads and rivers. To keep things speedy, you could have four buttons to replace the “yes” (with all of them linking to the next picture): “settlement”, “road”, “river”, “more than one of the above” For areas already kind-of-mapped, it would be nice to have an overlay of mapped things, and be able to give feedback on map completeness.

Glenn, they did introduce more than just a few needles in the haystack, I believe about 40.

That is good to hear. I never thought the timestamps could be this useful. If ever I find the time to work on my project, I’ll replace this measure of work with a more detailed one. I just counted the number of active days of all mappers - but then it would look like it does make sense to count actual mapping time. Which would be pretty cool - to make a map of the total hours worked on a given area in OSM.

I don’tg exactly understand the measure of labour time. There are only timestamps every time you hit save, right? So for the first session, you can only guess. How many users only have one session? If this is a high number, your assumption will have a large impact on the estimate of average labour time.

The most striking graph for me was the box plot with experience/contribution rate. The median experienced user didn’t really contribute much more than less experienced ones. But by the plot, the avarage would be much higher. So among the experienced mappers, there is a small minority who does A LOT of work. But it’s not because you’re an experienced mapper, that you belong to this super productive group. And it probably has to do with what you pick: if you trace five new roads in half an hour, you’ll have much less changes to your name as when you reclassify fifty in the same time.

That said, I used to run a little IFTTT project to collect the new contributors in Belgium. Not only did I welcome the mappers with some basic tips and links, I also did a quick revision of their first changeset. I couldn’t continue this because I was on the road for a year, and unfortunately noone picked it up completely while I was gone. If we would still have done that, almost certainly all the mistakes would have been fixed within the week. Also, we wouldn’t have to be doing all this hating, we would have just said: dude, this is not the way to go. Let’s find another way to test your hypothesis.

That said, it’s a pity this guy didn’t just contact the openstreetmap community first. It’s not that hard to create a pseudo-experimental setting to measure speed of correction of certain types of mistakes - and results would have been much more significant. It’s a bit like going to a neighborhood and vandalizing some public property, just to measure how quickly local governement fixes stuff in different neighborhoods.

I just heard that it was a university student in my hometown Ghent that did this. He did this within some research for a thesis (masters degree) comparing quality of OSM and other data sources for navigation purposes.

Dieter, I tried to contact the mapper in question two times now. No response. I think he speaks Russian, so maybe he just doesn’t understand? I did talk to the local community before going ahead, and they were more than ok with it. I lived in Bolivia long enough to know that no village is called “Village” there. And if ever the user comes with a proper explanation, this is one easy edit to revert. So, yes, I should have waited a week or two before going ahead, but other than that, I really don’t see a problem.

By the size and type of his edits (e.g. this and this, I think he’s doing imports without mentioning the source. This has raised eyebrows before. Also note the lack of common node between rivers where they join - maybe an error when converting data?

As for the Maproulette or manual revision: I thought this might be useful, because I found a case where the residential area around the node had the name of the village, but not the node. But I checked quite a few of them manually, and didn’t find any other cases. So no, a Maproulette task would not be useful to find the names. However, it might still be useful to add roads to these places. This is one area of the world where -a lot- of roads are still missing!

Hey Warin, I did check the history on some of these nodes. From what I can tell, it’s remote mapping, not someone erasing real names. But in my enthousiasm I didn’t think to stop and ask the mapper(s) who mapped the places like this. I wouldn’t think twice to do that if I were stumbling upon them one by one, but I can see how that is different on this kind of scale. Sorry! I’ll contact them now - this is really a simple edit, so a revert shouldn’t be any problem. I edited the post above to warn people to do as you said.

Not that I can see any valid reason for the way to map it like it was. I understand the rules for situations where there could still be discussion about how to map things - I just didn’t see this case as a possibly controversial one. And I did take some precautions, as you see above.

Yes, this is very practical. Strangely enough it didn’t work with the GPX output for this Overpass Turbo Query, but it did when exported to GeoJSON.

I travel a lot abd like hiking and driving myself. A smartphone can do both, and OSM maps were the cheapest good solution. Started with Osmand because it also makes tracks, still using that. I knew you could edit the map, and soon learned that it was a lot of fun too.

There is no way to make a map that pleases all countries in the world. Because Openstreetmap wants to make the most practically usefull map as possible, the consensus is to map according to control on the ground. For example, the Krim is shown as part of Russia, because for all practical purposes, it is. Even if this is not recognized by the UN or other countries.

Or is the mapped border not the de facto line of control?

One of the major shortcomings of the standard style (and any online maps I’ve seen), is the lack of surface visualization.

See the thread here: https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/110

This is hugely important in all countries except those where most of our contributors live :) Important roads might be unpaved, increasing travel times enormously. When planning long distance trips, this is about the first question you will ask the map: what roads are available, and are they paved.

Argentina is a good case, as all important roads are mapped as either trunk or primary, without concern for road quality. And almost all roads there have the surface tag. In countries like Peru and Bolivia, this is even more important information, but data is much less complete.

I believe Katpatuka has done some imports too, admin areas. Nice to see lodde1949 here, human number we if I counted right. He’s almost singlehandedly mapping the entire landuse of Flanders. A lot of work, as our zoning laws are a mess and land ownership incredibly scattered.

Interesting idea. It might be interesting for practical use, like what are the common opening hours for banks or supermarkets in a given area (e.g. use the most common value for closing time). Or if you go city tripping, you might want to know if there’s anything to do on a Sunday. Or if you’re In city government and want workers to stick around after their shift ends, you might want to follow up on how many shops stay open after 5 pm. All the more important to map more POIs, with their opening times.