At Development Seed we’re always looking for ways to contribute to open source projects. Recently, we started thinking about how we might be able to help improve the OpenStreetMap (OSM) ecosystem of tools. Of course we had our suspicions, but to insure whatever we came up with had the whole OSM community in mind, we started with a round of user interviews. Below you’ll find our process and findings, in hopes that we can all start supporting tools to serve the greater community.

Process

User interviews are essentially what they sound like, interviewing users to better understand who they are, what they do, how they use OSM tools, and what they feel could be improved within the OSM ecosystem. To try and capture the opinions of such a large group, we broke up the community into 3 different groups:

• Inexperienced mappers, ones who had only mapped a few times
• Experienced mappers, including people who map for their work vs people who map on their own
• People who want map data, people at organizations like American Red Cross or HOT

We interviewed at least 4 people from each group, to ensure that we were hearing from a number of different voices. For the 19 different people we talked to, from Belgium to Japan, we asked them a base set of questions, and asked follow up questions based on the discussion. There were a lot of interesting patterns and ideas that emerged from our conversations:

Having a community is key

• Most mappers want to map what they know and are concerned about what is nearby to them. This seemed to outweigh the desire to contribute to humanitarian efforts, although that did make mappers feel as if they were doing something good.
• New mappers often learn more quickly when they have a community, than they would otherwise. Being a part of the community is a huge motivator for people to map.
• Having someone who can give feedback and make mappers feel welcome increases retention.

Understanding completeness and complexity drives motivation

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