@imagico - Some of the people I mentioned did make edits to the document others help by providing insights. I didn’t ask specifically if they endorse the proposal. I’ll leave it to them to say.

Welcome to OpenStreetMap. Like you I live in a small town. Nice thing about living in a small town, one person can make a big difference and you are doing that. Way to go. If you need anything don’t hesitate to ask.

Clifford AKA Glassman

Thanks for your contributions. OSM needs more dedicated contributors.

Do you have a breakdown by editor of the errors?

1. To save time have the students preinstall JOSM. Nothing can disrupt the class like a student trying to install Java and JOSM. For those that don’t preinstall, ask them to follow along with another student. They can install JOSM later.
2. It would really help to have an assistant to walk around helping students that get behind.
3. Keep to the basics. As @feyeandal said, two hours is short. I’ve covered JOSM in two hours but it doesn’t leave time to work a HOT Task.
4. Their first challenge should be something local. The imagery should be familiar to them which help first timers.
5. Once they have been working on a task for a while, stop for a few minutes to introduce new topics, such as keyboard shortcuts.
6. When you stop in step 5. above, remind them to upload their work.
7. Make sure they upload before leaving. If they wait until later, it’s likely someone else will have worked on the task resulting in duplicate objects.

Of course when you are done, in keeping with the spirit of OSM, head for a pub to celebrate.

Best of luck, Clifford

Why is HOT singled out? New mappers make mistakes all the time. I just fixed, and commented on the changeset, a street tagged as a gate, instead of a node on the way where the gate was actually located. HOT tasks have a validation step. You could spend some time validating tasks.

Anther approach, which I’m in favor of, is to build better systems to prevent mistakes in the first place. Take my example above, why doesn’t the editor complain about adding a gate to a highway=residential way? Or your example of the polygon house tagged as a railway.

The problem isn’t HOT. HOT only stands out because so many new users get their start on HOT projects.

iD’s new feature of asking for a review is a good start. I believe that [OSMCha]{ https://osmcha.mapbox.com/) will be update in the near future to flag changesets asking for a review.

Clifford

Strava works as a layer in JOSM. Place it on top of an image layer to trace roads or trails. It can be added to iD, but only as a background image instead of a satellite image.

I would encourage you to look into JOSM. It isn’t that difficult. [LearnOSM]{http://learnosm.org) has some JOSM tutorials to get you started.

Best, Clifford

Another option would be to rank cities, villages, etc., by how active the OSM community is in that area. It certainly would be a more interesting presentation, at least to us.

Sorry you discovered our convoluted import process in this manner. As [maxerickson](osm.org/user:maxerickson} noted, the process is designed to improve the quality of imports and to insure that the data being imported is compatible with the ODbL license. The process at times helps the quality of the import by improving the tags, reducing nodes, improving the geometry and as point out, adds suggested data like addresses, that can also be imported.

I would encourage you to join the [OSM US]{https://osmus-slack.herokuapp.com/) Slack import channel. We can help you through the steps next time you want to import.

FYI - You could have opened up the building shapefile as a layer in JOSM and just copied in the data. More work, but not an import. Licensing is still and issue.

Clifford

Not identifying yourself to us is troubling. All we have is your user name. Please identify yourself so we can learn more about you. Tell us about what some of the other research projects you may have been involved with.

Thanks, Clifford

I’m waiting for the one in my neighborhood to complete. Looks like another week before they start on the center island. With the four corners done, once they start on the island, I’ll try to get it added.

I just added a few businesses this week with no problem.

+1 for @TomH’s suggested reading. Join us on the Slack Import channel to discuss your import plans and get help.

https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/mmd My goal is enabling push notifications. If email oauth permission gives that capability then I’m in favor of seeing it implemented. If too many people opt out because they don’t want to give their email address then oauth permissions may not be the right means to an end.

https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/RobJN comments express my thoughts on push notification. If this is the wrong PR, then we need to come up with a better PR.

mmd - apparently you wouldn’t be in my target audience in anyway. It doesn’t appear your user_name has edited in OSM.

Mikel, You seem to have two major threads in your diary entry. The first is Local Chapters and the Second is Communications. Not to belittle Local Chapters, but it’s the communications aspect that interests me.

Push notifications is a dream for many of us. It’s likely that only a small fraction occasional mappers belong to one or more of our current communications tools. Push notifications isn’t going to solve our communications problem, but it will help, so long as we can prevent spam.

Two other communications avenues that need exploring is more press and conducting user surveys.

Local Chapters would ideally take the lead to get articles published. Currently most articles on OSM are connected with either Missing Maps or HOT. I’ve had new mappers sign up for humanitarian events that believe OSM isn’t used for developed countries. Getting press isn’t easy. I worked with a consultant for the 2016 SotM US trying to crack the barrier. I suspect we need to look at other approaches to find what interest the press.

Surveys could be used to help understand how people find OSM to help us in our “marketing” and learn their preferred method of communications.

Lastly, as someone who “borrowed” the Belgium welcome message and have been using it for the last couple of years - I agree that we need to do more to welcome new mappers.

Clifford

I got the exact same message which I ignored.

@pizzaiolo Wikipedia has the problem of scaring off new users by their over zealous “police.” As a result, they have a real problem attracting and keeping new editors. We could find ourselves in a similar situation if we are not careful. It’s a thin line that we have to follow.

Unfortunately very few of the pokemon edits announce their efforts in the changeset comment. It really takes looking at every changeset. Sad.

@BushmanK - I haven’t spent much time with Keepright - but I suspect you are probably correct. I thought of Maproulette because I recently fixed a number of buildings with self intersecting ways using Maproulette.

Clifford

Another alternative might be Maproulette which means the edit gets a human to verify the object.