I am continuously surprised by how few people outside of the community know the story of OpenStreetMap. Coming into this community from a world of writers and communicators who spend their days spinning up stories–some of them more worthy than others–sometimes feels like visiting another planet. For writers, the worst crime is what old time newspaper editors used to call “burying the lede”, meaning hide the thing that makes the story interesting. OSM might just be the biggest buried lede in the history of storytelling.

It’s surprisingly hard to tell a good story. Everyone can type an email, but not everyone can make it interesting enough to read. Stories tend to have a “beginning, middle and end,” but so do research reports, tax forms, and parking tickets. Facts and data can add up to a story, but not without interpretation. Telling someone “about” something is not a story, either. If I tell you that the Lord of the Rings trilogy is about a hobbit who travels to the ends of the world to get rid of a magic ring, would you know what happened in the story?

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Last month, at SotMUS in Richmond, Virginia, I, along with Marjan Van de Kauter and Keara Dennehy, presented on “How to Use OSM Channel Data for Effective Communications”

Background:

The genesis of the project comes from Marjan Van de Kauter’s and my work piloting an OSM community engagement program for TomTom. To make sure we were communicating about TT’s organised editing correctly, we began tracking and organizing communications channels. As the list grew, we realized we needed a better tool, so we worked with a TomTom developer to build a webscraper that could show us in which channels the community was active.

Later, we brought Keara on board as a business analyst who could build a more robust tool to manage all of the data. By this time, we had realized that this information was something that the community could use at the global, regional and local level.

Then, when I left TomTom, but kept volunteering for the CWG and the OSM/F board on fundraising and communications, we saw additional applications for the data. So, we decided to create a proof of concept for a communication channel data store and present our first efforts and findings at the 2023 SOTM US in Richmond.

The Context:

As background, Marjan and I shared some of the results from the Communications Survey we conducted in May. I wrote about it here. Some of the findings were skewed, but we identified some interesting trends, including:

• Some respondents reported that they felt the forums have a hostile tone (35%)
• Many respondents said they were able to keep up with the conversations, both locally (60%) and globally (49%). Nearly 70% said that they got at least one useful response if they posted a question
• Respondents were more likely to read than post: 379 said they read daily or weekly and 152 said they posted daily or weekly
• Older respondents were more likely to use the Listservs or Community Forum, whereas younger respondents were more likely to use Discord or Reddit

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[broken link]

Though I am not a sophisticated mapper, I really enjoy updating the local POIs in my area. Here’s the story of one of adventures that I wrote for my town’s weekly newsletter, “Enthusiasms:

In Praise of OpenStreetMap

[post deleted]

Hi, everyone,

Between the end of April and mid-May, my former TomTom colleagues * and I posted a communications survey with the goal of gathering some information about how OSM users experience OSM community communications. Now that the survey is complete, I want to give it context as part of our presentation at State of the Map US in Richmond, Virginia.

At SotM US, we will be presenting on How to Use Data for Effective Community Communication. (The project is supported by TomTom and informed by work that two of us have done for the CWG, but it’s not formally a TomTom or OSMF project.) Our primary source of data for this presentation is derived from a tool that scrapes publicly available, anonymized, channel data from OSM listservs and forums. To augment this data, we created a communications survey. We knew that we would not be able to get a broadly representative cross-section of the OSM user demographic with our limited time and resources, but we did believe we would get some additional details that could help inform our approach.

The survey had a mix of free answer and multiple choice questions about demographics, local community involvement, and experiences using the various forums, lists and other channels. We created 12 versions of the same survey to post in 12 different channel types so that we could get a sense of the user demographics per channel: community forum, mailing list, Telegram, Twitter, Discord, Slack, Mastodon, Reddit, IRC/Matrix, weekly OSM, Facebook, LinkedIn. We received 464 responses, with more responses from Europe and North America than from Latin America, Asia and Africa. We will present a few of the observable trends at our presentation, with the caveat that they are more impressionistic than representative.

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