Hello all, As you know Open Mapping Group McGill (OMG McGill) organized one of the mapathons last week for the town of Williams Lake, BC. For the turnout please turn to Julia's website published earlier today on the list.
As a mentor of the group I might be the 'director' of this event according to the proposed policy by the OSMF board. In this role, I want to assure you that we tried to do our best to teach new mappers how to do their job properly, as Charles stated on this list yesterday. And judging from a preliminary analysis of the data I conducted with the overpass api, the participants did a pretty good job. Of course, the data needs validation, which we will conduct in the next couple of days. However, I do not see the rush proposed on this list earlier. Ideally, validation would happen right after the mapping event (as set out in this manual for HOT tasks [1]). In the real world, we all have our jobs, families and other voluntary engagements, that sometimes do not allow to act accordingly. I further think it is not even necessary for tasks that are not related to immediate disaster response or include ways tagged with a highway tag (in the later case it might confuse navigation apps if not validated right away). In many cases, validation, or better, correction of data entered by individual mappers (not part of group events) was (and still is) done many days or even months after the data was entered, depending on whether an experienced mapper has an eye on a certain region or not. With regards to buildings in areas where there existed no respective data before, I do not see any need for rushing. The important thing is that the organiser of a group event makes sure that the data entered by participants of the event *is* validated to ensure data quality. And we will. To this end, I appreciate that long-term members already offered to help us there (thank you, Charles!). I still consider mapathons a legitimate way to draw attention to OSM, to advocate for open data, and to show the potential of OSM data and the lack thereof in many parts of the world, including Canada. From the experience of our first mapathon I got the impression that we instigated a vast interest in open mapping (which, I think, is a valid goal on its own right) and I expect quite a couple of returning participants to our next events, in which we will train them further on the complexities to produce good OSM data. By continuing, we might be able to motivate one or two persons to turn into long-term mappers; this is, by the way, totally in line with the long-tail phenomenon researchers found in all crowd-sourcing projects. All those reasons I mentionend, are, I think, worth it continuing doing what we did. I would appreciate, if the attitude towards group mapping events were less hostile on this list and on OSM as such (I am aware of less fortunate attempts conducting group mapping events recently; but try not blame them, but give them a hand to do it better next time - and I know you did, but some of them apparently did not understand how communication works in OSM). Try to give them the benefit of the doubt: most mappers, even in group event, do this voluntarily and because they want to enjoy extend this great geodatabase! IMHO, OSM cannot do without those events, because we do not want to leave the future of OSM only to businesses and their paid mappers (and we have seen that in some countries, including Canada, there might not be enough people who find their way to OSM without those events). Tim [1] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSM_Tasking_Manager/Validating_data#When_do_we_validate.3F _______________________________________________ Talk-ca mailing list Talk-ca@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-ca
