Quoting Nic Roets <[email protected]>:
On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 4:04 PM, Richard Weait <[email protected]> wrote:
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
Maybe it's dangerous to say, but I think that the growth of the Dutch
community has been negatively affected due to the AND import. The
scale of the Netherlands is not comparable to the US and Canada, and I
think it would have been feasible to have the road network in the
country mapped completely one or two years ago. As a result, the Dutch
community is relatively small, compared to the UK and Germany. Not
that many OSM related events are being organized, and those who are
organized often have a low turnout.
In Canada this would be nearly impossible. I've done a lot of mapping
there myself, before the Geobase dataset became available (end of
2008). This was in a region (province of Quebec) which already had low
community activity. I don't think Geobase and Canvec has a negative
effect, but despite these datasets available and being imported, the
community seems to grow over the last few years. Of course it is up to
the importers (me being one of them) to learn from past mistakes, and
take utmost care and listen to other users while importing the data.
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