Hi, I just wanted to add my own experience and suggestions regarding the marking tiles done in the task managers.
The term "done" is really very binary and somewhat difficult to define. Particularly when remote mapping, there will always be some features that one can't recognize or is unsure about and thus might leave out. Is the tile then done or not? Because of that I could imagine some people will err on the side of caution and basically mark nothing as done, and others might take it as because mapping is never truly done, even a first rough pass is "done" enough. I wonder if it would thus be helpful to make the "marking done" system a bit more fine scaled? I.e. either have a slider for percentages of completeness, or at least break it into lets say 4 - 5 categories, like "partly mapped", "mostly mapped". Furthermore, I am wondering if it be worth splitting the "done" by features? I.e one can say that the "roads" are "mostly mapped", the "rivers" are "partly mapped" and buildings are "hardly mapped". Or if specific aspects of lets say buildings are to be mapped. Like one task that requested if roofs are "permanent / corrugated metal" or "natural", then it might be useful to break out the completeness by features. E.g. "mapping buildings" can be "mostly done", but "mapping roof top properties", is only "partially done". That might be useful when one is comfortable mapping some aspects, but not others. That gives people who want to chose a tile a much better overview of what to expect and can choose the tiles better according to their abilities. It also would make it easier to get better statistics of the overall status of a task than just the binary "done/not done" of tiles. Making tiles much smaller, as has been suggested, could potentially be another option of how to increase someones confidence in that a tile really is done. With respect to motivation to contribute, I think it might be useful if more information could be available about the projects and how mapping really does help the project and particularly the people affected. For high profile events like the earthquake in Haiti or Nepal or typhoons, the main stream media does part of this and everyone prominently sees the pictures and stories of those affected and thus gains an emotional connectedness to the task. However, for many of the lower profile, ongoing tasks, that is much less the case. So perhaps it would be good, if the task descriptions could have links to project descriptions, blogs or other press material describing the project and how it tries to help. The more that can be directly related to the mapping, imho the better. And perhaps it could even include a description of how the task would have to be done, if the maps created by HOT were not available. I.e. directly showing how a volunteer mappers work effects the work of the project. Some of the task descriptions already do a decent job at this, others imho are too vague to really get excited about. Just my $.02 Kai -- View this message in context: http://gis.19327.n5.nabble.com/Projects-on-the-HOT-OSM-Tasking-Manager-lots-of-them-tp5861769p5861924.html Sent from the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap (HOT) mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ HOT mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/hot
