On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 4:04 PM, Richard Weait <[email protected]> wrote: > On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 7:55 AM, Mike N <[email protected]> wrote: >> On 4/5/2011 4:58 AM, Andy Allan wrote: > >>> Sometimes I wonder if one of the problems OSM >>> is facing in the US is the relative paucity of examples where OSM >>> volunteers have mapped to higher standards >> >> Are you claiming that nearly everything people have surveyed in the US is >> crap? > > The combined result of our work in North America suffers by comparison > to our European overlo^W cousins. Individual mappers are, of course, > brilliant, dedicated citizen cartographers and "smarter than the > average bear". That's what draws us to OSM. > > But the North American community has not grown like the European > community did. Is this because North Americans find OSM less > appealing? You suggest one possible reason this might be true. > >> The biggest issue in the US is that people's reaction is that we already >> have "Free Google, Bing, Yahoo and Mapquest" maps. Why is there even >> another map? > > Possibly. That is sometimes the reaction when I introduce people to OSM. > > 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. > > By comparison, consider Toronto, pre-imports. See the Geofabrik > animation, around August 2007. > > http://www.geofabrik.de/gallery/history/index.html#toronto > > 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. > Imports didn't arrive in Canada until later in the animation. > > This is not a scientific study, obviously. > > As another, single point of comparison of communities, consider local > OSM groups. > http://usergroups.openstreetmap.de/ > > There appears to be a local OSM user group for each > 100 Million USA-ians. > And one for each 10 Million Canadians. > And one for each 2 Million Germans. > > The USA got imports early. > Canada got imports a bit later. > Imports seem much less popular in Germany. > > Correlation? Causation? I don't know.
Let's compare the USA with the Netherlands: Both had imports of the complete road network. Yet the ratio of users registered on the wiki to population is one in 2 million and one in one hundred thousand respectively. http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Category:Users_in_United_States http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Category:Users_in_the_Netherlands _______________________________________________ Imports mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/imports
