It is called OpenStreetMap, without spaces. Hope that’s something you’ll learn as well 😜

As per improving the website: a notification center along with some push notification facility (as the community forum does) would be welcome. Emails may get stuck in the “notifications” folder that many Gmail users probably rarely read. Really, even for active mappers the response rate is suspiciously low.

However, a closer look reveals that there has been a slight decline in the number of active contributors over the last three years

It’s not as dire if you disregard maps.me - https://piebro.github.io/openstreetmap-statistics/#21d9

Thanks. People would like OSM to attract many more new mappers and scale up, but before that we need our monitoring to become more robust. Right now the OSM community (and DWG) are able to manage vandalism and other harmful edits, but barely. Only the relative obscurity of OSM makes this not a problem right now. Google Maps for instance has been plagued with vandalism for the past few years.

At OSM Poland we use Google Alerts to track new installations of Automated External Defibrillators. The RSS is connected to a dedicated Discord channel on our server. The signal to noise ratio is variable, sometimes Google picks up the phrase “defibrylator AED” on another link in the sidebar of some news site, but overall it helped us add many AED we would’ve otherwise missed.

In 2022 we had 813883 account creation events in Matomo, while in 2021 there were 953865. This is fairly close to the percentage drop in edits.

Please be aware that uBlock Origin blocks Matomo due to its inclusion in EasyPrivacy list.

@Zverik: It is simply a cold calculation. In case of new users no matter how friendly you are (sending a welcome message, commenting the changeset with explanation how to map properly, etc.) most of the time you get zero response and the user churns anyway never to be seen again. Monitoring edits and fixing them is a Sisyphean task, feeling very ungrateful, and OSM community at large is not prepared enough for the system to balance out. For example, I am the only person out of 200 mappers in Poland who sends welcome messages through https://welcome.osm.be/ .

I think is better to let people self-select with low human intervention. In the startup world they defined “activation” - a threshold/event at which the user is likely to retain. In case of early Facebook, it was “7 friends in 10 days”. If I could define a similar event for OSM, that would be fantastic; we can surmise it’s only a few of 50 new mappers per week in Poland - which is way more manageable and allows for a more personal approach.

Did they really need to manually fix the outline if every single row was mapped? Wouldn’t it just require a somewhat tuned ST_ConcaveHull?

These must be aerial images, no satellite imagery is better than ~30 cm. The only free data available is where the local government shared their aerial imagery as open data.

@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).

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.

@googlenaut: I do not think MapRoulette is an optimal choice here. As you can see on the map, syntex edits one city block at a time. MR is not well-suited for such edits, not to mention the work is better left to one person, as it’s more nuanced. MR challenges ask people to do only one thing, and here he does several, depending on data quality in that particular spot.

The catch is that you will see this only after committing to the survey by entering the e-mail address and completing captcha. For better or for worse, people are wary of entering their e-mail without understanding the reason.

A post on OSMF blog would not hurt either.

Hi Allan, it seems this survey intro has “who”, but lacks “what” and “why”. People seem to be confused by this on OSM forum and reddit.

and I could not find volunteer translators to edit and correct the machine translations

It appears that for Japan the FB group is the main means of contact (for better or for worse).

Hi,

I messaged you about a problem a while ago. Admin boundaries for filters are very very crude. When I type ‘pomorskie’ and select “województwo pomorskie” the boundary is simplified too much and misses much area of the coast. Moreover, the boundaries are simplified without regard to topology (“województwo zachodniopomorskie”) doesn’t have a matching boundary with it.

Hope it’s possible to fix this! Maybe you could re-generate boundaries with MapShaper library, it takes care of topology with way less issues than GRASS for instance.

They had some feedback about the draft Attribution Guidelines, since it would require them to do more than they do now.

And they should do more! I had an impression that people don’t take Nuno Caldeira seriously. But even given his exaggeration he’s got a point. Maybe our corporate sponsors think their deep pockets solve the issue.

Here’s a thought why it may be crucial to acquire new mappers: https://hackernoon.com/powered-by-an-acquisition-channel-that-drove-initial-growth-for-43-saas-companies-my-analysis-l7133ex9 (We’re not a SaaS obviously, but it holds anyway).

Besides, does the above feedback create a conflict of interest?

Podoba mi się to :) Wiele z tych obiektów może jednak mieć nieoczywiste tagowanie, warto by było je tam dodać. Rozdzieliłbym też je na sekcje wg tego, co jest obowiązkowe w każdej gminie, a co w powiecie.

Hi, a somewhat tangential question. I organized two OSM beer meetings in Gdańsk, PL, with varying success. I scheduled the meeting once on Doodle, the second time on Framadate.

Some 2 weeks ago my friend invited me to a Meetup (about embedded programming) which he co-hosts. I did a quick research and sadly it’s quite pricey to host a Meetup group, though there was some vague mention of fee exemption for non-profits. Do you pay much for it or do you qualify?

Hi Joost, do you have membership stats by country for 2019? I’m curious about Poland in particular.

Fajna lista, choć ja bym rozgraniczył te które być muszą (np. są w każdym powiecie) od takich jak np. szkoły wyższe. Bardzo przydałoby się zebrać tagowanie dla nich.