I like to reach out to mappers who are new to the area where I live, just to say hi and make them feel welcome, and invite them to our local meetups. I use a tool called Meet Your Mappers to identify the mappers who are new in my area, and use a spreadsheet to organize the work to contact them. Pretty low-tech :) and I know there are some tools that can help organize this work, but this works for me! So a quick explanation of how I do it:

Meet Your Mappers is a web based tool that retrieves a list of mappers in a given area and classifies them by their activity patterns. You select an area or enter an OSM relation ID for an area:

And after a while you get the result, a list of mappers with some interesting data, that you can save as a CSV file:

Disclaimer: I built this tool.

I continue then by importing the CSV file into a spreadsheet program. I use LibreOffice Calc, but it would probably work similarly in Excel.

I then use the data filtering function to only show the mappers that are classified as ‘new mapper’. I sort them by the number of nodes they added. I think mappers who have added more than a few nodes are more likely to respond to my messages, but I don’t have data to back this up. I could have chosen ways or relations as a metric too.

Then I use the spreadsheet HYPERLINK and CONCAT functions to construe a ‘new message’ link for each mapper in a new column. It looks like this:

=HYPERLINK(CONCAT("https://www.openstreetmap.org/message/new/",A2))

Clicking this link opens the page to send a new message to the mapper in this row, because the OSM username of the mapper is in column A.

I can then ‘ctrl-Click’ on this URL to open it in a new browser tab. I use the same text for each message:

Hi, I noticed you recently started mapping in the Salt Lake City area. Welcome! I am a fellow mapper living in SLC. I have been contributing to OSM since 2007. If you have any questions please just drop me a line.

We have a small local group of OSM mappers that get together from time to time in / near downtown SLC, usually on the second Wednesday of the month. You’re welcome to join us! We announce our events on OSMCal.

If you’re a Slack user (or don’t mind becoming one), there is an active and friendly community of OSM mappers there, and we have a #local-utah channel on it. You can join via this link.

Happy mapping! Martijn / mvexel

After I send the message, I put the date I sent the message in the next column to remind myself that I sent this user a message, and when.

Happy Mapping :) Our next meetup is on May 11 and you’re welcome to join us!