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The MapComplete user survey results: Part 1: user demography

Posted by Pieter Vander Vennet on 8 March 2023 in English. Last updated on 11 March 2023.

MapComplete user census

As you noticed, MapComplete ran a user survey during january. What did it tell us?

The use survey had a few goals, namely:

  • discovering what demographies are using MapComplete (and which are missing)
  • and discovering what needs and wants are still there

Basic demography

The first question is of course: who did fill out the survey? If we look to the numbers, a clear pattern emerges.

The age distribution looks pretty normal - there is a clear peak around the bucket 30-40, which falls down left and right.

The gender is not as balanced. Unsurprisingly, the majority of respondents is male:

Around 10% of respondents identified as female. This indicates that women are vastly underrepresented in this survey - ideally they would be around 50%.

11 people identified as having a non-conventional gender. Note that there was no option for trans people - they could choose between either their chosen gender or use the ‘something else’. As such, I don’t know how much trans people are in each category. One person, identifying as female however stated to be trans (and I suspect that there are a few more).

Non conventional genders are thus vastly overrepresented in this survey. According to Wikipedia, about 0.5% of adult populations identify as non-binary. With 11 out of 177 respondents using a non-conventional gender, we end up at 6% - or ten times what we would expect if the OpenStreetMap-population would reflect the broader population. But, this also indicates that we are a welcoming community in that respect - or at least I hope so.

Another clear bias are the computer skills. 55% of all respondents indicated that they are programmers - another huge overrepresentation:

Now, this is a bit painful. MapComplete aims to be an easy-to-use tool for non-technical users. The survey clearly failed to reach these people (and maybe MapComplete has a hard time reaching those people too).

This is also mirrored in the question on how good they know OpenStreetMap. Close to 75% indicate to have at least hundreds of edits.

For someone to fill out the survey, they first need to hear about it and find the link to fill it out. The communication and communication channels about the survey are thus important. As the survey has been promoted via Mastodon, this probably had a major influence: Mastodon has a userbase which is both very developer-oriented but also quite queer as it has (relatively) many transgender and genderqueer people. As the post about the survey gained a lot of traction there, I suspect many found the survey via that channel (thus partly explaining those biases).

A second important effect is the language. The invitation for the survey and the survey itself where all in english. Developers are generally fluent in English, but a non-technical user might not bother with a survey that is not in their native tongue. As MapComplete is mostly popular in Belgium, Dutch- and French-speaking people might not feel compelled.

At last, some people from minorities are less likely to fill out surveys (source). I tried to counter this by explicitly inviting those groups to fill out the survey in the request, but this psychological effect is very hard to measure.

As such, while I do think that the data is mostly representative of MapComplete-users and the OpenStreetMap-community, I think that less-technical people are a bit underrepresented.

Identity

A last question in the ‘demography’-set was “how would you describe yourself?” - a notoriously hard question which only 66 persons (37%) answered.

This question is intentionally open-ended, as people will normally state what they find important in life.

18 of them mentioned to be a map lover or OSM lover, 15 self-identified as being a ‘techie’, ‘developer’, ‘engineer’ or similar. 8 found Open Source-software important; 7 mentioned to be interested in environmentalism, urbanism, transportation and/or political issues. Other notable mentions were to be involved (professionally) with GIS, to be a teacher (2), a cyclists (4) or a rock climbers (2). One person indicated that they were ‘disabled’.

about the next post

So, this wraps up the first part of who filled out the user survey!

Read more about what themes people preferred in the next article about the user survey

Subscribe to my mastodon or the MapComplete Mastodon to get updates about further news.

Discussion

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