Hi all, I am following the Hot Mailinglist for a while as passive reader and since Nepal more active.
These last weeks I was thinking a lot how to help new mappers while achieving more standardisation and compareable output. In my opinion HOT needs a highly customizable and automatic configurable editor. Think of some sort of Potlatch where the items are automtically restricted to the ones needed by a specific task. All the tags and comments are automatically filled in. For example: The user just needs to draw a polygon click on the house button and save. No more confusion if building=yes or building=house should bei used All the presets are done by the Taskmanager and the defined task attributes. If you look at the various statistics, you will see that a high percentage of the edits has been done in the first few days after the desaster by new OSM users. Many of them contribute only a few changesets or less. I was asking myself why this happened. Was there not enough help und information? I dont think so. I think that the informations have been too much and too spread for first time users. And l think that many of them where overwhelmed by all the things they have to think about. So why not moving the rule and format stuff into an editor? The avantages of such an editor would be: a) No bothering with tags, comments, etc. b) Reduction of the chance of duplicates. Because no elements outside the task elements are allowed. c) Standardisation, through predefined tags and elements d) Simple to use interface for users who want to help but dont want to know the in depth details. ( Those who want to know will switch to another editor anyway) e) optional integrated help f) automatic functionality like squared buildings I know this does not help for the Nepal crisis mapping but I think this idea is worth a thought for improving the quality of data in the future while motivating new users to map more and therefore speeding up the completion of HOT tasks. Kind regards Thomas
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