The idea was already at least half a decade old when I posted https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/osmf-talk/2016-September/003935.html

Broken record mode: what would help is if we simply could get news out to mappers regardless of if they have signed up to a forum, mailing list, etc etc etc That could improve participation in local events and so on without having to scourge the wiki or whatever..

There is no question that

a) essentially only the people on osmf.talk read it (given that the link is semi hidden, there is likely no accidental stumbling on it at all), that is roughly half a tenth of a percent of the people that have actually contributed to the map (irl it is naturally less).

b) just from a numbers pov it is obvious that nothing on osmf.talk has even the slightest bit of influence on mapper attraction and retention,

c) even adding up all mailing lists and forums the total number of participants is likely to be less than 1% of mappers that have actively contributed (in numbers roughly 2’500 forum users and a couple of 1’000 of mailing list subscribers), again the above applies

d) most mappers on OSM never interact with anybody else except via editing the same data set, and seem to be quite happy with this.

Summa summarum, even the notion that the mailing lists or the forum in total could have any noticeable influence on the number of new mappers or retention of them is simply absurd, and the fairy tale attributing that to osmf-talk should simply be seen as trying to gain political leverage and nothing else.

@PierZen mikel is simply just doing what he is paid for, no need to blame him for that, the problem are the excessively naive people that believe him.

@mikelmaron jaronswain simply confirmed that it actually has nothing to do with the OSM community in Canada and that they are now investigating convenient other sources for mechanical turks.

Not to mention the involvement of your employer in this which you forget to mention.

Are you sure you are using vespucci? There is no such thing as a “selection cross” in the app.

If you are using it, please have a look at http://vespucci.io/help/en/Introduction/ or the same text in the on-device help.

What is exactly “community-led” about “Building Canada 2020”? I haven’t seen anything that indicates that it is something else than stats canada trying to obtain a source of cheap mechanical turks (and a couple of bystanders making some money from the project).

You might want to tell us what you are actually trying to do, particularly what makes it too hard to do on vespucci.

Just a further note on increasing the possible accuracy: the 7 decimal digits are a consequence of using 32bit signed integers for the coordinates, changing that would be fairly involved.

In any case effects due to movements of the continental plates are larger (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_tectonics#/media/File:Global_plate_motion_2008-04-17.jpg ) than the limits on accuracy due to our coordinate representation and if anything should be addressed first.

Maintaining a larger set of presets is a lot of work and we don’t really have enough manpower to go around as is and for example just track common use as is (see the large difference between iD and JOSM presets). I’m not convinced that multiplying the number of presets is going to fix anything except burn even more time.

PS: @RobJN crossing=* the wiki has said something else wrt “uncontrolled” since 2008 (crossing just with road markings) and I suspect that reflects common understanding more than an “unmarked” crossing..

Yes 50 years is only recently.for a social science concept, or put differently it hasn’t really proved its value yet (lets discuss that in a 100 years or so).

To be clear this is not about if there should be more female participation in OSM or not; yes there should be, naturally. Different point of views are naturally welcome, OSM is from a number perspective dominated by white European males, but that doesn’t mean we don’t want to accommodate or support adding stuff that is not part of our culture, daily life etc but in general you need to take the initiative yourself instead of waiting for an OK or something like that (see below).

Back to the example:humans of the male sex are unlikely to be able to map vending=femine_hygine from a practical pov,

But even so the problem is the numbers are so low, the 1’400 odd condom vending machines were added just by 500 contributors, and a single person could probably easily skew the numbers one way or the other within a week. That is assuming that the vending machines in question actually exist in larger numbers, which again is difficult to determine for the already mentioned reason.

Are there other similar cases of probably sex-based physical access restriction biases to be found?

The other side of the issue is that there isn’t actually a preset in any of the major editors for the specific value. Which makes it rather difficult to map such facilities to start with (spelling and so on). I’ve opened an issue for iD and vespucci to fix that, but see my point above: if you want to make something easy to mapped regardless of any sex related issues, you need to add presets for it.

Gender is mainly a grammatical concept that got started used as a social concept only recently, much to the confusion of people that actually speak languages that are grammatically gendered.

So lets stick with the sex of contributors to try and avoid that confusion. I think the “pub” example is particularly bad anecdotal evidence, not only because we don’t actually have an extraordinary number of pubs mapped compared say to toilets and other objects, associating them with just one sex is invoking a stereotype as @SelineYang points out.

The good thing about OSM is that the data is open, and so it is easy to test claims against the real numbers, and I find it very difficult to see any pattern at all with respect to objects mapped, if at all and you want to invoke sexual stereotypes things that are typically associated as being male tend to have very low counts, and such that are higher counts associated with female stereotypes.

In the case of vending=condom vs. vending=femine_hygiene it is comparing a near zero number to zero and I’m not sure that there is any takeaway from that, outside of that universally people don’t seem to map stuff in their toilets.

0.9.9 has been released now. Note that we don’t/can’t “push” release to F-Droid and have no control over what they are offering. They have been listing 0.9.9 for a while, without pointing out that it is a beta release though.

Das grundsätzliche Problem an den Awards und an den Modalitäten ist, dass man auf Teufel komm heraus gezwungen wird sie zu vergeben, siehe z.B. den Innovationsaward, da ist nichts aber auch gar nichts innovativ, aber nein man kann nicht dafür stimmen den Award nicht zu vergeben.

I’m fairly sure that they haven’t been able to successfully upload anything so there is no way to find them via changesets.

The other comment would be, after completing the survey, that it seems to be rather biased towards assuming an UK/US education system (for example by ignoring the dual-training system popular in German-speaking countries) even though DACH and the rest of Europe form the largest part of our contributor base (not to mention the language bias by only offering the survey in English).

Could you link to the “ recent research that has found a strong male bias in OSM participation” It is not directly a secret that at least at the visible level there is little to no non-male contributors, but your wording seems to be a bit ambiguous and might be referring to something else.

News @SimonPoole/diary/41672

Just a note on the side: the DigitalGlobe Premium imagery looks really good in the area ff5722 referenced, so no reason not to simply trace the roads there. Best by the local community, but that is a bit difficult in the case of China, I suspect if everybody chips in we could have far better coverage in a reasonably short time.

Yoshinion can you point to a changeset that removed such information? On general when vandalism is suspected it is better not to fix things piecemeal but to do a full revert (or ask somebody to do one).

Simon