David Earl wrote: > I'll certainly be contacting people now Frederick has provided an easy > means to evaluate the data, but I'm not overly optimistic about people > replying - I run a membership database and find maybe 10% of people > change their email addresses each year, and half of those don't tell me, > and that's when they've paid an annual sub to belong.
I strongly recommend investing some time into mailing non-responders. I've done it for mappers in my region a while ago. About half of them reacted within a day or so; until today 22 out of 26 have agreed. One even started mapping again. Sadly, the other 4 did not react at all. (Note that this was before the second mass mailing, the success percentage would almost certainly be lower today.) When writing the mails, I put some effort into personalizing the mail for the recipient by looking at their user and edits page on osm.org. The changesets and bounding boxes on the "edits" page are very helpful to find out when and where the user has contributed to OSM. If they have a clearly defined area of interest, I'm including the name of that area or town in the mail. To emphasize that this is not an automated mass mailing, I also tell them who I am, as well as my motivation for writing to them. As for the subject, I prefer to avoid legal jargon, but clearly state that a response is required - usually by phrasing it as a question (along the lines of "Can OpenStreetMap continue to use your contributions?", but in German of course). YMMV, Tobias _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
