Re: [Talk-ca] Enablers and Barriers for Voluntary Participation in Crowdsourcing Platforms

[john whelan]

Your points are well taken but in this case when the building outlines are
imported by someone like James and are of high quality to start with as
they were in Ottawa then these concerns are less relevant.

At the moment Stats Canada have released some building outline data under
the Federal Government's Open Data license.

So far I haven't seen anyone say they are interested in importing it.
Generally speaking local mappers are involved in the import or not to
import decision making process.  This is country wide so who would make the
call?

Locally in Ottawa we have already imported the building outlines so Ottawa
isn't really part of this.

Bjenk is no longer available, his advantage was he has worked with the
local Ottawa mappers.

I'm not seeing any groups of local mappers saying yes we would like this
data. Montreal in the past have said they are interested but don't have the
resources to do the import nor to add tags to the buildings afterwards.

Julia was involved in the web page for 2020 but coordinating something of
this size would need more than Julia and I'm not sure if she is active in
OSM at the moment.

My concern is if the data is available either at the moment or in the near
future through Treasury Board's Open Data portal then mappers who have been
importing bits of CANVEC data through the portal will treat this as being
the same and we will get lots of very small imports of perhaps half a dozen
buildings scattered across the country.

A more systematic import would be less work over all and insure cleaner
coverage.

Cheerio John





On Fri, 2 Nov 2018 at 14:58, Pierre Béland  wrote:

> Bonjour John
>
> Tu as vu avec moi lors de coordination de Réponses humanitaires majeures
> telles Ebola en 2014 et le Népal en 2015 l'arrivée de plus en plus de
> mapathons notamment organisés par MissingMaps.  Les flux constants de
> nouveaux arrivés qui viennent pour quelques heures s'initier à OSM,
> ajoutent beaucoup de problèmes difficiles ensuite à gérer. Et on l'a aussi
> vu oui avec le projet B2020.  Ceux qui proposent de démarrer de nouveaux
> projets d'import doivent doivent être prêt à consacrer beaucoup de temps  à
> la coordination et accepter toutes les frustrations et difficultés.
> Difficile de contrôler tous les groupes scolaires ou autres qui veulent
> participer mais de façon non suffisamment planifiée et structurée.  Bien
> intéressant pour une classe de s'initier à OSM. Mais comment assurer que
> OSM bénificiera de cette expérience?
>
> Pour un bon tableau de suivi, il ne faut pas uniquement des nombres
> d'objets ajoutés. Il faut aussi des indicateurs de qualité tel que
> l'indicateur sur les géométries irrégulières que j'ai développé récemment.
> On y voit les projets où un nombre anormal de bâtiments sont tracés avec
> des formes irrégulières. Mes analyses montrent que les statistiques pour
> une ville ne devrait montrer en général que des ratios en 5 et 10%
> d'immeubles avec des formes irrégulières.  Pour un projet en Ouganda, j'ai
> observé un ratio de près de 60%. Évidemment, lorsque l'on analyse de plus
> près, beaucoup d'erreurs qui risquent de ne jamais être corrigées.
>
> voir
> fr  https://opendatalabrdc.github.io/Blog/#!index_fr.md
> en https://opendatalabrdc.github.io/Blog/#!index_en.md
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Pierre
>
>
> Le vendredi 2 novembre 2018 12 h 31 min 59 s HAE, John Whelan <
> jwhelan0...@gmail.com> a écrit :
>
>
> My feeling is OpenStreetMap has two sides.  The first is local adding
> local knowledge to the map.  The other I'll call armchair mapping.  When
> Stats Canada did the pilot it tapped the local Ottawa mappers who meet
> physically.
>
> I would agree that amongst mappers with the most edits there is a high
> number of retired people and those with disabilities involved and these may
> not be visible.  Tapping them for groups coming together to map can be a
> problem.
>
> In my view typically the most productive mappers are those with a special
> interest.  Adding WiFi access or churches for example or even a change of
> street name.
>
> We also have a number of teachers who would like to use OSM and in
> particular the building project to involve their students.  We get a fair
> amount of data added but the quality can be questionable.  HOT and others I
> think have found that using a restricted set of tasks and tags works best.
>
> My personal feeling is giving feedback is useful.  So the challenge for
> the building project is how to engage people.  What are the most useful
> tags to add?
>
> I'd suggest some sort of web site giving the number of buildings mapped
> and the tags that have been added by city.  Graphs with time as one axis
> would be nice.
>
> Certainly certain activities are more complex than others.  Importing
> buildings is not a task I'd suggest for teenage mapper with twenty minutes
> experience.  Breaking out the tasks is a task in itself and for 4 million
> buildings I think it could benefit from a project plan.
>
> I think we've 

Re: [Talk-ca] Enablers and Barriers for Voluntary Participation in Crowdsourcing Platforms

[OSM Volunteer stevea]

On Nov 2, 2018, at 9:31 AM, John Whelan  wrote:
> My feeling is OpenStreetMap has two sides.  The first is local adding local 
> knowledge to the map.  The other I'll call armchair mapping.  When Stats 
> Canada did the pilot it tapped the local Ottawa mappers who meet physically.

Speaking from nearly a decade of experience, OSM has many, many sides, though 
the two that John Whelan identifies are two many find "readily apparent."  I 
quick-read the study, which was actually quite informative in that it broke up 
similar crowdsourcing efforts (OSM is only lightly mentioned) into demographic 
categories, with some surprising results.  One is that many volunteers are 
older, sometimes disabled (stroke victims noting benefits of "repetitious tasks 
which help my brain to heal" was cited) and have a particular need for the 
sorts of social feedback which projects like this uniquely offer.  (At the same 
time, there is often a sharp dichotomy between these sorts of crowdsourced 
projects and social media, with many in the study who prefer the former 
appearing loathe to use the latter).

Another very important take-away is how participants in projects like these 
truly improve their skill-sets (seriously improving quality of submitted data) 
over time:  like many things, the longer one participates, the better become 
their skills.  This emphasizes the importance of "growing experts," something 
seldom mentioned in OSM.

> I would agree that amongst mappers with the most edits there is a high number 
> of retired people and those with disabilities involved and these may not be 
> visible.  Tapping them for groups coming together to map can be a problem.

It might appear that way (that they are invisible), yet there is no denying 
that "they find you."  In short, "build a project that attracts older, likely 
high-skill (or can grow there) participants, and they will come."

> In my view typically the most productive mappers are those with a special 
> interest.  Adding WiFi access or churches for example or even a change of 
> street name.

While it is difficult to say why mappers become productive, it may be even 
harder to do the apparently more simple task of defining "productive."  I know 
one mapper who flits about the entire planet in OSM, seeking to "up his stats 
on a leaderboard" as he measures the number of edits he makes in the tens or 
hundreds of thousands.  Needless to say, the quality of his edits, and how 
productive he is, is a matter of contention.  There is such a thing as "high 
quality" and in OSM this can and should be defined and refined especially for 
major projects.

Certainly "quality of data entered" is one metric, yet even that can be hard to 
define or measure, unless strict criteria are established at the beginning of a 
project as a goal to strive.  Once again, and especially in highly ambitious 
projects (like BC2020) this underscores the need for some up-front planning, 
up-front project management, up-front expectations of data quality and up-front 
documentation of all of these things so that these expectations are met and 
measured along the way.  (Project Management 101, really).

> We also have a number of teachers who would like to use OSM and in particular 
> the building project to involve their students.  We get a fair amount of data 
> added but the quality can be questionable.  HOT and others I think have found 
> that using a restricted set of tasks and tags works best.

I personally have experienced helping professors at the university level 
(computer science, environmental studies...) use OSM, as students at the 
undergraduate level readily take to OSM.  Younger students (high school, middle 
school) enjoy some success with it, more often at smaller, less ambitious 
tasks, a recently popular one in the USA being "micro-mapping our local school 
campus."  (Drinking fountains/water stations, extremely detailed sporting 
facilities, footways and associated potential routing, landscaping, 
restricted/off-limits areas, parking areas for autos, motorcycles, bicycles, 
etc.)  What often works is breaking students into functional groups (sports 
facilities, transportation, amenities...) and having a teacher/administrator 
check the results of each group.  The tags can start out restricted and stay 
that way, or they can start out restricted and allow the students to develop 
further "depth" by researching OSM's wiki pages, or even (yes, this is 
advanced) structure their own scheme.  For example, a high school has four 
different libraries in several different buildings, or extensive sports 
facilities, how might we best tag these?

And whether young, old or in-between, Martijn van Exel (an OSM superstar) has 
proven with his (well, largely his) MapRoulette project that "gamification" can 
really super-charge particular kinds of data entry/improvement sub-projects 
like few other strategies can.  The Study confirms this, saying "Platform 
features such as gamification, 

Re: [Talk-ca] Enablers and Barriers for Voluntary Participation in Crowdsourcing Platforms

[John Whelan]

My feeling is OpenStreetMap has two sides. The first is local adding 
local knowledge to the map.  The other I'll call armchair mapping.  When 
Stats Canada did the pilot it tapped the local Ottawa mappers who meet 
physically.


I would agree that amongst mappers with the most edits there is a high 
number of retired people and those with disabilities involved and these 
may not be visible.  Tapping them for groups coming together to map can 
be a problem.


In my view typically the most productive mappers are those with a 
special interest.  Adding WiFi access or churches for example or even a 
change of street name.


We also have a number of teachers who would like to use OSM and in 
particular the building project to involve their students.  We get a 
fair amount of data added but the quality can be questionable.  HOT and 
others I think have found that using a restricted set of tasks and tags 
works best.


My personal feeling is giving feedback is useful.  So the challenge for 
the building project is how to engage people.  What are the most useful 
tags to add?


I'd suggest some sort of web site giving the number of buildings mapped 
and the tags that have been added by city.  Graphs with time as one axis 
would be nice.


Certainly certain activities are more complex than others.  Importing 
buildings is not a task I'd suggest for teenage mapper with twenty 
minutes experience.  Breaking out the tasks is a task in itself and for 
4 million buildings I think it could benefit from a project plan.


I think we've seen with the 2020 project that just saying it would be 
nice to have by is not really enough to sustain it but who would do it 
I'm not sure.


Cheerio John


Jonathan Brown wrote on 2018-11-02 11:28 AM:


Apropos the ongoing efforts to educate new volunteers, the discussion 
section of this research paper on enablers and barriers may be useful 
https://ac.els-cdn.com/S0747563216305295/1-s2.0-S0747563216305295-main.pdf?_tid=31ea73b8-7cb4-4eca-acc4-062aa79c278b=1541171937_ecb61791a7d798a1491503b71f69b0ab 



Jonathan



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