Scout (USA) has been powered by OpenStreetMap data for about 5 months now. From day one, Scout users have been able to report navigation errors to us:

We have since received thousands of reports and we have worked hard to review them and learn from the feedback we get from our users. We have manually submitted OSM notes where we could not resolve the issue ourselves, and we have fixed dozens of map issues based on the incoming reports. But we felt that we could do a better job closing the feedback loop between Scout users and the OSM community. We have now taken another big step towards this goal with direct OSM Notes creation from Scout US.

Some Scout Feedback will automatically become OSM Notes

As of last week, certain kinds of feedback we get from our Scout US community will be posted to OSM Notes automatically. We apply a smart filter to make sure that only reports that we think the OSM community can fix get posted. For example, ‘Destination Incorrect’ reports will not make it to OSM, because Scout does not use OSM data to locate addresses and businesses. And we will only forward reports where the Scout user entered a sensible looking comment.

What happens when a Scout user posts a note that passes our filter? Let me walk you through the process. The screenshots are from an actual note posted by a Scout user a few days ago.

Post to OSM

The report is translated into an OSM note and posted to OSM immediately. We take the location of the report as the note location, and add the report comments as the note text.

The note will also contain a link to another page that contains more information that may help you resolve the issue. We include the a part of the GPS trace of the user before and after they submitted the report (anonymized to remove any personally identifiable information of the user) and the OSM map data version used when the Scout driver submitted their report:

Confirmation Email

As soon as the report is posted to OSM, we send the Scout user an email telling them that their report is being reviewed by the OSM community. Of course, we also encourage them to fix the problem themselves and include a link to the note.

Note Resolved!

The Scout report system monitors the OSM notes it posted and kicks in as soon as they are closed. (In this case, I resolved the problem myself by adding a turn restriction and tagging a link road as such.) We will send another email to the Scout user telling them that their note has been closed.

What’s next?

Our objective with this new feedback loop is for the Scout and OpenStreetMap communities to connect. With Scout’s switch to OSM last April, all of a sudden we gained many more eyes on the OpenStreetMap data. This is an important step in feeding the intelligence we get out of that back to the OSM community. We plan to continue down this road and find more ways for the Scout community to help out in keeping OSM in great shape!