On 4/5/2011 10:04 AM, Richard Weait wrote:
And also possibly this. If somebody learns of OSM and is curious enough to look at their home (we all check that first; you know it.) and that part of Anytown, USA looks superficially complete based on TIGER. They might just decide, "Enh. They don't need my help." And so TIGER may have discouraged an OSM contributor from starting.
If so, this reaction will happen with a mature map - the community will shrink due to lack of work.
It seems to me, from memory, that starting around August 2007 was a boom-time of new OSM contributors in Toronto. We had some of the city grid on the map, and a few detailed neighbourhoods. A new user faced with that might say, "I'll come back when your done" but a new mapper might just say, "Oh, look, I can add my neighbourhood and make it look better, like $nearby-neighbourhood." That obviously-incomplete map may well have inspired dedicated mappers to start to participate.
As a counterpoint to that, thousands of new subdivisions have sprung up since the last TIGER import. I see quite a number of Skobbler reports, noting in great detail that their subdivision is missing, and listing the missing streets. So why didn't they just go ahead and add their streets if they knew them? Similarly, I have never seen some new user just pop in and add their new subdivision in my watch areas, which include many hundreds of square miles and probably 500 uncompleted subdivisions. A new user probably has never heard of TIGER, and has no idea that their blank street might exist in some import, and that fact wouldn't discourage them from jumping in. Whatever the US situation that hasn't produced a vibrant community, it is not the absence of the "lure of the open/blank road".
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