On Tue, Apr 15, 2014 at 4:20 PM, Martijn van Exel
mart...@openstreetmap.us wrote:
Hi all,
I want to thank all of you who were able to make it to DC this past weekend
for coming to SOTM US. I had a great time and that was in no small part
because I was able to get together with some of the folks here on this list.
I'd like to echo Martijn. .MARTIJN. .Martijn. .martijn.
Martijn is a fine example of the type of person who made my trip to DC
so enjoyable. I had a great time establishing and renewing
friendships with other mappers. It was super to put some faces to the
names, email addresses and 'handles' of some of the folks on this
list. Thanks again, Martijn, and those of you who's ears I bent. :-)
Thanks, too, to the event volunteers. If there were any
organizational problems at the event, I wasn't aware of them. The
schedule was mostly on time, without appearing too rigid or too
regimented. Plenty of hot beverages were available in the hallway
throughout the event.
In addition to enjoying technical presentations and chatting during
the breaks, I had the opportunity to speak to many people who were new
enough to OpenStreetMap that they hadn't yet improved the data in
their neighbourhood. I think this deserves a call to action. So here
I go.
I'd like to see more direct advocacy to become a regular mapper of
your neighbourhood at events like this in future. That neighbourhood
mapper / maintainer is an ideal primary goal for OpenStreetMap. I
suggest that any city or state that can boast of A Mapper on Every
Block is a city or state that is perfectly mapped and always up to
date. We aren't there yet and so we'd best work harder at it.
It was great to see the tutorial for new mappers during the morning of
day one. The room was packed to over capacity when I peeked in.
Surely offering that same tutorial morning and afternoon of each day
would have provided opportunity to convert more of those potential
mappers into mappers. It is a missed opportunity to send some
potential mappers home without some coaching after they have travelled
to a conference to learn more about OpenStreetMap.
One of the goals of this event appears to have been to reach out to
those who are merely consumers of OpenStreetMap data, based on the
number of people there who were consuming OpenStreetMap data but had
never edited to improve it. Surely a primary goal of an advocacy
group that seeks to benefit OpenStreetMap must be to turn those
consumers into contributors? By turning a consumer into a
contributor, the data benefits from their local knowledge and thus we
all benefit from improved data. I suggest that turning a consumer
into contributor also makes that consumer into a better educated
consumer. Surely data consumers are better able to understand and
appreciate the OpenStreetMap data that they consume once they
participate in and understand the methods to collect and contribute
that data. A better-informed consumer is surely slightly better for
OpenStreetMap. If that consumer also becomes a contributor it is
clearly better for OpenStreetMap.
So that's my call to action. Let's aim to allow every attendee to
edit OpenStreetMap if they haven't done so previously. It would be
wonderful to see a much higher percentage of technical talks and a
higher percentage of community focused talks.
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