This is a follow-up to a pedrito1414 diary entry on Silvester 2020, which itself, at least from my point of view, was a follow-up to a IRC chat the two of us held on 2020-12-15.

From our chat Pete distilled a short list of nine more or less urgent “issues to address / aspects to improve”. We’re 8 months later and a few days ago I downloaded the online HOT projects summaries, to choose some statistics that might let us measure the process and how it has been improving. Of these 9 points I think that the easiest to measure are #6: “TM projects don’t always get closed out” and #2: “Tasking manager transparency - project creators”.

Let’s start from #6 about non closed projects.

The one thing that HOT is not doing, they are not systematically setting a limit to the projects they host nor directly run: of the 3009 still active projects, 2848 (94%) does not have a due date. for the 587 projects that have been created this year 2021, 460 (78%) does not have a due date. it is a small improvement. limiting this to directly HOT owned projects, it’s a total of 315, of which 297 (94%) do not have a due date. This year it’s 111 projects directly owned by HOT, 94 (85%) of which without due date.

I’ll mention the two top outliers, which did set a due date goal for all their projects: osm-libya (37 projects) and unique-mappers-network-nigeria (5 projects).

Without a due date, it’s easy to let things slip through your fingers, so no surprise there’s still 2 open projects from 2012, 24 from 2013, 27 from 2014, and a total of 1378 unclosed projects published before 2020.

The other issue, #2 about project creators, in my opinion it has to do with local involvement, or lack thereof.

In Panama I observed that projects on the HOT TM server have always been started without first attempting to use the official channels nor to contact the top local mappers or peruse the channels most used by local mappers for informal communication. in 2021 HOT supported Rory Nealon from YouthMappersInternational create two projects (10318 and 10361) next to each other near Chitré, in the Azuero Peninsula. By the way, Rory is the other person who was involved in the identification of issues to address. Maybe I contributed to making the local Youth Mappers Chapter YMUP feel under pressure, and I’m glad to observe that these two projects have both achieved an exemplary percentage of mapped and validated. The validation process was ran remotely by four non local mappers, all of which accepting feedback I provided as comment to their changesets. An other step would be Evaluating the completed projects, maybe something for subsequent process improvement.

Charlie, a local mapper from Belize, even less “Latino” than myself, let’s say we possibly share some sort of “Hanseatic” point of view, after some chat about remote mappers, gave me the idea I could have a look at Belize. I found 8 open projects, 6 of which opened in 2020, all owned by SColchester from ‘hot’. Charlie had told me, and I could confirm his complaints, that these projects were attracting unchecked low quality edits to areas he and an other local mapper are slowly but carefully digitising. I contacted the project author SColchester, commenting on one of the projects, telling him of the local complaints, and he pointed me to two web pages (1 and 2) where I could follow their Organised Editing action. I find these pages overly generic, and they state that the campaign was already closed. still the 6 projects stand at an average validation of less than 15%, and contained among other beginners’ blunders: trees, trucks, and albedo patches mapped as buildings, and several repeated objects even within the same changeset. Things that happen, but things that should trigger feedback from the organisation to the mapper, preferably before the mapper disappears from OSM.

I corrected a few errors, and commented to the authors (all of them touch-and-go, one-day-butterflies), and I tried to do so in the most constructive way (1, 2, 3, 4). Still it’s my opinion that it should be the project owner providing this feedback and if they do not have the time that they should delegate someone to the task.

The difficulty in doing the above, it’s in the numbers:

organization	author	published projects
operation-fistula	Privatemajory	117
american-red-cross	edircksen	131
medecins-sans-frontieres-msf	Jorieke V	142
hot	SColchester	191
integration-consulting-group	felixhohl	483

After Belize, I thought I would have a look at whatever new projects were being opened in the area, and I found a staggering 21 new ‘hot’ projects, all owned by ‘SColchester’, in Guatemala. In the Telegram OSMLatam chat I asked if there were anybody from Guatemala who wanted to comment about it, and I got an answer from HOT voting-member ‘mapeadora’, who told me I should stop my witch hunt, that people from Guatemala are clearly involved, and that I should change subject. I did inquire whether and where this project was on the Wiki and she doesn’t know, because it hasn’t started yet, and that my attitude made things all more difficult. So I let go of the OSMLatam chat and go back to the statistics. There’s no ‘DRAFTS’ in Guatemala for 2021, only these 21 ‘PUBLISHED’ projects, part of the OpenCities LAC campaign, 99% mapped, 12% validated. And back to my question whether they are on the Wiki, no, they aren’t. I’m sure they are finely mapped, I didn’t check that, and to tell the truth, I lost interest in helping Guatemala.

Let’s hope the OpenCities LAC campaign will come out of the closet soon, at least before it triggers projects in my areas of concern.

And yes, I know very well, I’m not good at saying things in a pleasant way. I’m sorry, all I say is in good faith and with the goal to improve the process. I also assume or worse expect good faith in others.