Any specific editing you are concerned about?

@pedrito1414 my concerns revolve around a couple of points (and none of them should imply that I’m or others are not supportive of MSF and other MM members)

• siloization of contributors that have their first and most of the time only contact with OSM through MM and to some lesser degree through HOT activations. In general organized mapping events have very low conversion rates and we only get that one chance to introduce the breadth of OSM. to most of them, it is not clear how much exposure MM event attendees get to other ways of contributing to OSM (and even if they are told that it can be a useful undertaking too) and how many go away to never return with the impression that OSM is only about drawing buildings in underdeveloped countries. See http://harrywood.co.uk/blog/2015/11/22/mapping-your-own-neighbourhood/ to realize that this is a real issue.

• contributing to OSM has this wonderful property that you can experience first hand that what you just added is useful. You can see the restaurant you just added on a map within minutes, or navigate to your friends address that you just added and so on. You don’t need anybody to tell you that it was useful, you -know-. MM replaces this, admittedly slightly egoistic, intrinsic motivation, with a third party telling you something is good and useful and that the world will be a better place because of it (overstated: with motivation via guilty conscience). I don’t believe that this is a recipe for long term success (neither for MM nor OSM). Frederik has already touched on the negative sides of gamifcation as motivation so I’ll skip that.

• overselling of the positive effects (this is less a MM issue, more a general one of humanitarian mapping in the OSM context). People are spending a lot time on mapping things with the impression that they are “saving lives” even though they might actually for example only be improving population statistics which could have been generated in many other ways, using a free and willing work force simply being more convenient and cheaper. In general it would become all to only activate and only ask for an activation when there is a compelling case that spending endless hours of volunteer time will actually make a difference. The overselling (I fully expect to see the next level of humanitarian hard-sell, aka crying babies, popping up on the relevant websites soon) tends to put off people that are willing to help in real emergencies but are not quite so gullible.

• drowning out of all other aspects of OSM in the media and public perception. Admittedly this is mainly the issue that the non-humanitarian parts of OSM are too quiet, but the net effect is that looking back at 2015 there is no way you can’t get the impression that humanitarian mapping is all OSM is about. This clearly impacts our ability to recruit new mappers for “normal” OSM given that the one thing we know is that media reports will drive new signups.

A final note: historically humanitarian mapping in the OSM context was something done mainly by at least moderately experienced mappers that had already mapped at least a couple of things that they could directly relate to (I’m not claiming that net quality was particularly good even then or that there were not other problems with the concept). MM has turned that upside down with the consequence that you need ever more coordination, validation and so on to handle the model of churning through lots of newbies to get comparatively small tasks done. Maybe some rethinking of how to get the tasks done most efficiently or at least trying something else for one target area would be a good idea.

@mikelmaron woodpecks transparency concerns are IMHO quite well founded particularly considering the direction MM is going in.

At least some of the funds seem to be funelled through the ARC. Given that the ~$3 billion ARC budget is quite opaque at the level that would interest OSM, it doesn’t seem to be unfair to ask for:

• pro-forma accounts (as I understand MM is not formerly incorporated and as a consequence is essentially not subject to any formal controls financial and other)
• a list of any donations and associated donors that were earmarked for MM and either given directly or via member organisations.

A further note. MM and the ARC seem to assume that repeatedly spending funds on and talking to the same companies inside the beltway amounts to engaging the OSM community, it doesn’t.

While most OSM contributors will agree with you that the two cases you list turn up often enough that they need a solution, the solutions are already here and have been in use for a long time:

• multiple addresses in one building: multiple address nodes, or if known addresses on the entrances nodes

• large site with multiple buildings: site relations.

The former doesn’t need any special support, the later is currently not rendered in the standard style (there are some technical hurdles before that happens). But as always there in OSM there is always an interaction between use of a specific mapping scheme and its support in the tools, simply use it more and it will get more support.

Simon

Hmm the underlying issue in the analysis is that it is somehow based on the assumption a) VGI has specific quality issues that “professional” information doesn’t have, and b) that the liability issues are significantly different for VGI based sites. Neither would seem to be true.

There are regularly mappers that return after numerous years of no activity (numerous as in more than half a decade). Obviously not a large number, but then OSM was a -lot- smaller then.

@mikke see https://github.com/MarcusWolschon/osmeditor4android/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+milestone%3A0.9.8 unluckily the oh spec is very complex and difficult to map to a reasonable UI which is the only reason it is delayed.

@all, not new, many times discussed:

We not only have an aversion against mass mailings, to do so with the current user base would be at least in a legal grey area in many many countries (which also happen to be those in which we have the largest new mapper influx).

Obviously the legal bit could be circumvented with an opt-in option during the sign-up process, which however would have its own problems and would only effect new sign ups.

@RobJN You are spinning what I wrote for political leverage.

Naturally I value the hit and run contributions just as I said, it is just that trying to force them to use an OSM editor -doesn’t- value them as what they are, people that what to add something small that they noticed was missing or fix a spelling error etc. without having to actually engage with OSM. Editors are the –COMPLETLY– wrong tool for that, (that includes all the so called (broken) “simple” editors).

@RobJN that naturally leads to the question: what is a non-OSMer supposed to be doing with an OSM editor?

Seriously, the changes are mainly geared towards making the common use cases faster and simpler for users with a reasonable knowledge of OSM. It is not targeted at users that have no further interest than a hit and run contribution, just as any other editor in OSM space (iD, P1/P2, JOSM). For hit and run contributors (nothing against them except that we don’t cater for them) we don’t really have any non-broken solution outside of submitting a note.

@santamariense you don’t have to change anything see http://vespucci.io/help/en/Presets/ (note that vespucci uses a different (better) translation system).

Ich kann mich nur MarkusHD anschliessen irgendwie hast du die letzten 2 Jahre verpasst, OSM Notes erlaubt essentiell alles was du forderst und es gibt auch genügen Apps die die API unterstützen. D.h. nicht das es an der Notes API nichts zu verbessern gäbe, aber das ist eher im Detail als grundsätzlich.

Du kannst auch falls du das Gefühl hast gewisse Tags fehlen oft einen entsprechenden TEst für OSMOSE vorschlagen (aber vermutlich gibts den eh schon).

@EdLoach there has at least been hint at some seasonality in the past. I had a look at the per country new contributor stats and they really show that there was a bit of shortfall across the board with the exception of Germany, the US being something over 300 new contributors lower than average.

Paul did you remove zero-edit changesets? Up to at least March 2011 they are quite significant distorting factor see osm.org/user/SimonPoole/diary/23352.

Not to mention that per object source tags are in general not needed and worse tend to be nonsensical in the long run.

@BushmanK ehhh I was actually agreeing with you, pls go back and re-read my comment. The only thing I was pointing out is that the discussion is not in any way new. For example the reoccuring theme of if we should actually show a map on openstreetmap.org at all, or if something more like openstreetmap.de would be better.

Funneling the information in to maproulette would probably make more sense (or in to osmose)

You’ve touched on a subject that is rather controversial and I’ve pointed out many times that there is no point on jumping on newbies, sometimes not even “new”, screaming it’s a database when we don’t actually say that upfront or even anywhere hidden. The text on the wiki you are referring to goes back to at least osm.wiki/w/index.php?title=About_OpenStreetMap&oldid=1461 so this has been a problem that has been with the project since the beginning.

We have a similar “we a can’t tell newbies the truth” situation with relations (which are in reality a simple concept).

Actually … the concept of attaching a source tag (except in extraordinary) circumstances to an object has been defunct since the introductions of changesets,, 5 years or so ago and it has been not considered good practice for multiple years.

I wasn’t suggesting that JOSM would fit your needs, just that the basic principle is not new, and that there is a large body of experience with the issues. Matter of fact every non-broken OSM editor has to handle the problems with syncing edits to the central API and dealing with conflicts to some extent. Naturally there is some value in being able to stage edits in some fashion to avoid network problems and similar, none of the current editors really deals gracefully with that, but that is a long long way from requiring a full OSM stack replacement.