OpenStreetMap
Just realized that I didn’t notice that on Tuesday (the 5th) I sent out the 10’000ths welcome message to a contributor.
I’ve been doing this for SOSM since December 2013, nearly 8 years ago, averaging a bit over 100 messages per month.
I’ve discussed our expectations (or rather the absence of them) before see https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/SimonPoole/diary/40071
PS: The happy “winner” was https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/JFischli
Discussion
Comment from Glassman on 9 October 2021 at 02:37
Thanks for all your hard work. Averaging over 100 message a month is a lot of work. There is some indications that welcoming new users help retain a percentage of them that otherwise wouldn’t stick around. A researcher suggested I do a a/b study to confirm that it does retain mappers. Me I’d rather just welcome everyone I can instead of proving some theorem.
Good luck welcoming your next 10,000 new users.
Clifford
Comment from RicoElectrico on 13 October 2021 at 12:47
I asked Polish mappers on the Facebook group about what caused them to lose interest after a few edits. One of the points made was they thought their changes need to be somehow approved (due to the inherent delay between edits and rendering of data). Now I know this and you know this (and probably don’t care), but this seems to be a pain point even for committed, regular mappers with a few hundred or more changesets (they complained elsewhere, on OSM Polska Discord). A pain point which is not really easy to address, I am afraid.
Comment from SimonPoole on 13 October 2021 at 14:17
@RicoElectro doesn’t the introduction to iD mention this? It is more or less clear from other messaging in iD but I wouldn’t expect that to register.
Comment from RicoElectrico on 14 October 2021 at 10:26
@SimonPoole: it says “in a few minutes” which is, well, optimistic in many cases. And was definitely not true for an extended period of huge load on OSMF tile servers. Maybe if we have Munin logs I could correlate that with new mapper retention (I have changeset metadata in a Postgres database).
Comment from gendy54 on 18 October 2021 at 12:36
In France, a few of us have tried, but it is time-consuming and hardly anyone responds to this message.