Thank you John for your thoughts. I agree that very prompt validation is best. If a mapper has badly mapped a few tasks, it is very hard to get them on track. If they come back for more mapping.

I’ll correct a couple of buildings, but more than that I won’t. A waste of my time as you say.

It took me a while to install JOSM, only on my hope PC. Many work environments are risk averse. Most users cannot install anything. Sadly many work mapathons based on iD editor lead to a lot of poor mapping. OSM rate limiting goes some way to prevent these issues. Mapathons are also a good way to introduce mappers to the wider OSM environment, so keeping up the communication with new mappers is important to encourage new blood.

Have fun? Oh yes, been my signature for years.

Adrian

Thank you for responding Severin,

I frequently wish the a Validator was a specific role with separate access controls, but I think that would require significant TM code changes. The role can be managed reasonably well by the use of teams, but that requires good project management authoring. Which is itself relatively rare.

I dislike the changeset approach to estimating mapper capability, but It’s what we have to live with. A good validator should also have good communication skills. Being factually correct with feedback can be off putting - I know as I’m likely to be quite direct, I don’t do shades of grey very well.

I will look up your videos. I think you in advance for breaking them up into smaller chunks. A 2 hours video of listening to others telling me something without me practising the skill is not my idea of a good way to learn.

You should put this on one/some of the LinkedIn GIS groups.

Hi rphyrin,

You’re not alone in wishing for direct mapper communication in TM. I’ve also directly communicated with mappers and encouraged them to join the HOTOSM Slack channel. This is for those that appear to have better general skills and have responded to validation comments. It does actually happen, sadly rarely.

Yes, many mappers never return, but some do. If I can improve those, I think I’ve got a win.

Re stalling projects, perhaps some of the stall is due to repeat invalidation cycle. I’ve just been part of a meeting which may result in some simple TM improvements, but we’ll have to wait a while after implementation to have enough data to prove there has been a beneficial change.

Yes Type 0 likely exists, but I don’t know how to identify them. Poor validation is always a risk. I know some is picked up prior to project archiving, but that will be items like unsquared buildings, feature clashes, shared nodes. Simple mapping errors not picked up.

Gaming the system. Sadly that will always happen in a personal Key Performance Indicators (KPI) environment. KPIs are usually developed to measure behaviour change, but frequently poor KPIs develop the wrong behaviours. I’ve seen a mapper split tasks mutiple times, creating a larger tasks mapped count. I’ve thought about sum of area mapped instead of task count. Splitting tasks would not change the total area.

I have listed your GeoScribble suggestion in a list of features to be added to TM to aid communication. Unfortunately I think it is unlikely to happen as much of the mapping environment is outside of TM. I can’t see how to get information back from JOSM into TM, iD editor might be better as it is wrapped by TM and maybe a separate layer could be captured into the TM database instead of OSM.

PS. How did you come across diary my entry? I’ve no idea if/where new diary entries are highlighted.

Thank you Sam, all good now.

Hi Sam.

I’m getting big purple boxes with ‘Content not viewable in your region’ messages for the images. UK based, VPN turned on and off, Firefox and Edge browsers. Any ideas?

Somehow, I feel that 1,000km roads is proportionately lower than it should be in terms of the volume of roads to be mapped - I seem to have reached that figure without particular effort. 5,000km seems more respectable. Not evidence based feelings!

Regards,

Adrian