Re: [Talk-us] Sidewalks as footpaths
Toby Murray-2 wrote Wait, what is the consensus method for tagging sidewalks? I haven't done a lot of them but I know I've added a few as footways myself. I have struggled with how best to map sidewalks in the US as well. In european cities my impression is that sidewalks are generally directly attached as part of the road, and they are typically just another (special) lane. So there you typically don't map the sidewalks as separate. Footways in those settings generally are real footways and thus deserve the prominence the style sheet gives them. But in the US (at least in suburbia), the sidewalks are often much more detached from the road with wide grass strips between them. They also sometimes aren't entirely parallel to the road. So there it makes more sense to map them as separate OSM ways rather than to use a sidewalk key on the main road. However, the separate ways also can have disadvantages for pedestrian routing. As a pedestrian, I would typically just cross a (non busy) road where ever I need to. If the sidewalks and roads are mapped separately, the router can't just tell you to cross the road though, but needs to route you to the next mapped intersection. One also needs to add a number of connection ways between roads and sidewalks which in that form doesn't really exist in reality, making the maps look even more messy. Not sure there is an ideal solution for this and we will likely see both explicit footway mapping and mapping as part of the road. It would still be good to come to somewhat more of a consensus on the topic though. Kai -- View this message in context: http://gis.19327.n5.nabble.com/Sidewalks-as-footpaths-tp5804729p5804760.html Sent from the USA mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
Re: [Talk-us] Steady increase in the number of mappers in the US
On 07/19/2013 11:06 AM, Kathleen Danielson wrote: Kai-- those are some really great ideas around publicity! Personally, I think we'd need a dedicated PR person on staff to fully accomplish this. That's not really feasible in the near term, though-- so maybe we should think about ways that we can break that down into volunteer-sized tasks? One good start might be to collect information about what has already being done. e.g. on the site http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenStreetMap_in_the_media i.e. make sure that all of the articles that are known about are listed and whether anyone in the community worked with the press to make it happen. For events like conferences or trade shows, it might be worth to create a little wiki page about what was done, when and by whom ( e.g. like http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Boot_D%C3%BCsseldorf_2012 ) and add it to the wiki category http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Category:Promotion So far the ones listed are mostly in German speaking countries. We need to be able to add some things in the US as well! That might give some help to figure out who to talk to if you are planning something yourself. This seems like a great Birthday Sprint project... (hint hint...) Yes, that would be a good topic and might go well with beer, cake and celebrations... Non OSM conferences and trade shows also seem like a great opportunity for OSM outreach and publicity, as those events can often also reach hundreds or thousands of people, many of whom might act as multiplicators as they are often the more active members in their community. Can the folks who were at the Esri UC talk about the OSM presence, the mapping party, and how that all went? On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 12:56 PM, Kai Krueger kakrue...@gmail.com mailto:kakrue...@gmail.com wrote: Clifford Snow wrote I'll start by just listing a few of my thoughts: We need publicity! Yes! Publicity is in my opinion one of the biggest things we need and should try and work on as a group. Looking at the data, it is clear that when ever there was significant publicity on OSM, the number of editors (particularly new ones) has shot up, at least for a while. While local mapping events are great and important, they probably only manage to get a handful of new mappers if at all. Having an article in a news paper or significant blog on the other hand is likely to get many more new mappers. Non OSM conferences and trade shows also seem like a great opportunity for OSM outreach and publicity, as those events can often also reach hundreds or thousands of people, many of whom might act as multiplicators as they are often the more active members in their community. So perhaps instead of setting targets of that we want to achieve X number of active mappers in a certain time frame, we could set a target of aiming to have Y articles about OSM in the press and Z talks / booths at conferences by then. Those targets are much more tangible than the number of active mappers as how any given action will effect that number is rather more speculative. As a group in osm-us, we can perhaps work on identifying likely magazines and conferences that would have an interest in high quality open maps. Which groups with interest might be particularly underrepresented and therefor good candidates for outreach? Furthermore, we can exchange ideas of what worked best at those events in order to improve the marketing message. E.g. how does one convince an editor that writing about OSM is worthwhile thing to do for their audience. How can you become a guest author to write an article for them and get it accepted? Which aspects of OSM are particularly amenably for writing good articles? If you go to have a booth at a show, what are things easiest to demonstrate? What are the demos that spark most interest? Then we can find local volunteers who actually go to the events or talk to editors to do the real outreach. We still have a long way to go from the 0.6 mappers per 1M population in the US to the 9 mappers per 1M population in Austria, but collectively we hopeful have enough skill and enthusiasm to really work on improving our PR and push those numbers up. Kai -- View this message in context: http://gis.19327.n5.nabble.com/Steady-increase-in-the-number-of-mappers-in-the-US-tp5770307p5770442.html Sent from the USA mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org mailto:Talk-us@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
Re: [Talk-us] Steady increase in the number of mappers in the US
Clifford Snow wrote I'll start by just listing a few of my thoughts: We need publicity! Yes! Publicity is in my opinion one of the biggest things we need and should try and work on as a group. Looking at the data, it is clear that when ever there was significant publicity on OSM, the number of editors (particularly new ones) has shot up, at least for a while. While local mapping events are great and important, they probably only manage to get a handful of new mappers if at all. Having an article in a news paper or significant blog on the other hand is likely to get many more new mappers. Non OSM conferences and trade shows also seem like a great opportunity for OSM outreach and publicity, as those events can often also reach hundreds or thousands of people, many of whom might act as multiplicators as they are often the more active members in their community. So perhaps instead of setting targets of that we want to achieve X number of active mappers in a certain time frame, we could set a target of aiming to have Y articles about OSM in the press and Z talks / booths at conferences by then. Those targets are much more tangible than the number of active mappers as how any given action will effect that number is rather more speculative. As a group in osm-us, we can perhaps work on identifying likely magazines and conferences that would have an interest in high quality open maps. Which groups with interest might be particularly underrepresented and therefor good candidates for outreach? Furthermore, we can exchange ideas of what worked best at those events in order to improve the marketing message. E.g. how does one convince an editor that writing about OSM is worthwhile thing to do for their audience. How can you become a guest author to write an article for them and get it accepted? Which aspects of OSM are particularly amenably for writing good articles? If you go to have a booth at a show, what are things easiest to demonstrate? What are the demos that spark most interest? Then we can find local volunteers who actually go to the events or talk to editors to do the real outreach. We still have a long way to go from the 0.6 mappers per 1M population in the US to the 9 mappers per 1M population in Austria, but collectively we hopeful have enough skill and enthusiasm to really work on improving our PR and push those numbers up. Kai -- View this message in context: http://gis.19327.n5.nabble.com/Steady-increase-in-the-number-of-mappers-in-the-US-tp5770307p5770442.html Sent from the USA mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
Re: [Talk-us] Steady increase in the number of mappers in the US
On 07/19/2013 09:57 PM, Serge Wroclawski wrote: On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 7:42 PM, Clifford Snow cliff...@snowandsnow.us wrote: Similarly, when the Washington Post covered the local DC hackerspace, we had two people stop in at the space (only two!) and neither of them joined. I'm not sure that two events are enough data points to state that publicity doesn't work. Let me give you more datapoints. We actually has two stories about MappingDC, one in the Post, and one in a government publication. Neither of those created any sustainable community. How do you measure sustainable community? Not everyone is going to come in person to one of the OSM events and that is perfectly fine. Many people might also hear about a project, become aware of it but then not contribute until months later. And for many there is the need for repetition. The first time they read about something, they might think it is an interesting project while reading and then forget about it. The second time they hear about it they might think it seems like it is catching on. Only the third (or likely even more often) time they hear about it will they think, this really sounds like a worthwhile project to contribute to, I should give it a try. To get a sustainable community, you need sustained PR. At some point a project is well known enough that just normal social interaction between the general public talking about it is sufficient to sustain the community. But with about half a mapper per 1 million population, OSM is still far away from that level in the US. Atlanta had a huge event through Cloudmade's ambassador program, with 200 attendees, and CNN coverage. Thea (the ambassador) invested a ton of time and energy into that community. But a couple of years later, and they were gone. That's a real shame that all that effort didn't lead to more. It might be an interesting case study to try and figure out what went wrong there. With 200 people that likely was one of the bigger events in OSMs history. Much bigger than many of the other activity in OSM that has lead to sustainable communities. Their community consisted mostly of OSM consumers, people working for groups interested in consuming OSM data, or talking about imports, but not of mappers. I really wanted Atlanta to work. There was enormous investment of time and resources in it, and outreach to universities, government agencies and businesses. I was hopeful at the time that data consumers would turn into contributors, but it largely didn't happen. These organizations are very interested in OSM as a datasource, but contributing is another matter, and organizing is yet a different matter still. These people were interested in OSM, but they weren't invested in OSM emotionally. I want to be clear that I think there's a very important place for outreach to data consumers, but I've learned not to expect that these people will turn into OSM contributors (I'm thrilled if they do, but I no longer come with the expectation that they will). The conversion rate is likely going to be low. That is always going to be the case. But if you have millions of users, then even if only 1% map that is already a large group. And if the download stats on various sat nav apps for smart phones based solely on OSM data alone are anything to go by, then OSM already has millions of users. However, for average data consumers to become mappers, it requires them to recognize OSM and know the data source is OSM. For that to happen, it needs a lot of PR to build a brand name for OSM, as well as more help from the various data consumer developers to make end users more aware of powered by OSM. Continuing to work more on both contributor marks and attribution marks with strong brand ties to the existing logo could hopefully help in that respect. I also feel that I owe both Russ Nelson and Richard Weait an apology. It's because of Richard's initial visit to DC that I heard about OSM and became interested in it, and it's because of Russ Nelson's visit that Kate Chapman, Steven Johnson, Katie Filbert and I all started MappingDC (and we started it together, as a group). So yes, it's possible to spark a community by a visit, but AFAIK, for all both of their hard work, DC was the only community where the work was sustained. Any thoughts on what sustains members? Yes, it's consistency. That's the #1 most important thing that sustains members. Run events regularly, monthly is best. And if you can, make it the same day. And if you can, make it the same place. Well, in the end, it is likely going to be a combination of all three. 1) People first need to be aware of OSM, as otherwise they won't contribute or come to any events. 2) There needs to be a reason to contribute. For many that is going to be products based on OSM that a 3) Finally the social events to turn casual mappers into power mappers and community organisers that are needed to keep the project
Re: [Talk-us] OSM Data Quality
Martijn van Exel-3 wrote As already noted, quality is in the eye of the beholder. Yes, quality lies in the eye of the beholder. Or perhaps better said in the eye of the data consumer. Therefore the assessment of quality will depend on the application and use case you have in mind. I think OSM has enough commercial users by now to be able to get a decent (subjective) overview of data quality without doing a scientific analysis of data quality one self. Instead one can probably ask the various developers of frequently used software based on OSM data, what the most common complaints of their respective end users are about the data. That should give a pretty decent overview of the data quality in practical terms and where the OSM community could possibly best focus their efforts to improve the quality of the data. Either through more mappers, or by quality control tools and perhaps even bots. Kai -- View this message in context: http://gis.19327.n5.nabble.com/OSM-Data-Quality-tp5763578p5763613.html Sent from the USA mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
Re: [Talk-us] Imports and Mass Edits in the US
Jeff Meyer wrote On Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 6:42 AM, Serge Wroclawski lt; emacsen@ gt; wrote: What is stopping these this from happening without a committee? Probably nothing. Although a committee might not strictly be necessary, it can give an additional boost of motivation and sense of responsibility to get through times when the work is necessary but less rewarding. It can also make things easier (better defined) for people with data to approach the committee rather than random individuals. But really, from the OSMF committees I have worked on, they are mostly just a bunch of people that would be doing things anyway now meet regularly on irc instead of on an random and adhoc basis. So it really doesn't make much of a difference and so if it helps with motivation, one might as well. Overall, I think it is a great idea. It seems clear that in general the US community is in favor and is (and has been) going down the direction of large scale imports. As imports are technically challenging and difficult, it is great to see if technically capable people deeply routed in the community take charge of the import process to ensure that they are done to the highest technical standard, instead of just standing on the sidelines and complaining that imports are bad and leaving the imports to people who are less familiar with the community standards and tools doing it anyway. Which leads to the poor execution of imports we have unfortunately seen so often in the past. Kai -- View this message in context: http://gis.19327.n5.nabble.com/Imports-and-Mass-Edits-in-the-US-tp5740698p5740730.html Sent from the USA mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
Re: [Talk-us] Fwd: Re: Post bot cleanup
Paul Norman wrote From: Toby Murray [mailto:toby.murray@] Subject: Re: [Talk-us] Fwd: Re: Post bot cleanup I'm also wondering if a routing regression suite exists anywhere that could be used to help identify broken interstates and other major ways, as the tagging changes and 2 node bridges that were likely deleted will take time to identify. There was something like this back when the TIGER import was new to help people connect major highways across county lines. Does anyone know the technical details or if it would be practical to bring back? It is documented here: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/TIGER_fixup/250_cities/routing_grid I think it's practical, I've given some thought to doing this. Maybe query one of the routing services to build it. OK, I have had a first stab at it. http://apmon.dev.openstreetmap.org/us_routing_grid.html It is only 25 cities so far, but if it turns out to be useful it can easily be extended to more cities. The big problem though is automatically figuring out if routes are broken or not and then colour them red or green accordingly. At the moment it doesn't do this at all. Anyone have some good ideas for this? The routing information is obtained from Open Source Routing Machine, which is amazingly fast at calculating all of these long distance routes. OSRM updates its data daily, so I think the routing data is based on OSM data from yesterday. I.e. post redaction. If there is interest I could regenerate this routing grid daily too. Kai -- View this message in context: http://gis.19327.n5.nabble.com/Re-Fwd-Re-Post-bot-cleanup-tp5717310p5717586.html Sent from the USA mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
Re: [Talk-us] Fwd: Re: Post bot cleanup
Martijn van Exel-3 wrote The big problem though is automatically figuring out if routes are broken or not and then colour them red or green accordingly. At the moment it doesn't do this at all. Anyone have some good ideas for this? The 'easiest' way I see is to compare those results with the same calculation based on data from a week or a month old. Wherever the difference in time / distance is more than a certain threshold, say 5 or 10%, the route needs to be looked at. OK, I have done something similar now, just that I used google calculated routes as a reference. Those routes that are more than 5% longer either in distance or time are flagged as red, others are green. This isn't perfect, but at least it gives a good first indication of which routes are broken and hopefully as people continue fixing the interstate system more and more routes will turn green. The updated version is at the same URL as before ( http://apmon.dev.openstreetmap.org/us_routing_grid.html ) Kai -- View this message in context: http://gis.19327.n5.nabble.com/Re-Fwd-Re-Post-bot-cleanup-tp5717310p5717675.html Sent from the USA mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
Re: [Talk-us] Redaction bot is heading our way!
Chris Lawrence-2 wrote On Wed, Jul 18, 2012 at 1:38 PM, Nathan Edgars II lt;neroute2@gt; wrote: http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=33.9958lon=-81.1074zoom=13layers=M I've fixed up I-20 between the Columbia River and US 21; looks like the damage goes both west and east from there at least to US 1 (west) and I-77 (east) but I've got other things to do tonight so I can't fix it all. I also started fixing the I-20 at the intersection to I-77, as the Interstate system around Columbia, South Carolina is a total mess. However, the I-77 north wards had so many issues, that I couldn't fix them all in a single pass. I decided to do some initial fixup along the I-77, leaving a number of intersections and the route relation broken. The question is, is it better to fix up a small bit thoroughly, or try and get as much of the interstate at least vaguely right as soon as possible, and leave the rest to a second pass? Unfortunately, I think I also ran into an editing conflict with you, as when I wanted to upload my changes, potlatch complained about version miss match on the I-20 relation. As I didn't know how to fix the conflict, I lost about 15 minutes worth of work trying to clean up the I-20 / I-77 intersection. So another question is, what is the best way to coordinate the general fixing of the interstate system to try and minimize editing conflicts? Kai -- View this message in context: http://gis.19327.n5.nabble.com/Redaction-bot-is-heading-our-way-tp5717069p5717161.html Sent from the USA mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
[Talk-us] OSM inspector routing layer now also available in the US
Hi everyone, I have just seen on the blog of Geofabrik ( http://blog.geofabrik.de/?p=96 ) that the awesome OSM-Inspector routing debug layer is now available for the US as well. It can be found at http://tools.geofabrik.de/osmi/debug.html?view=routing_non_eulon=-97.93506lat=37.41729zoom=6opacity=0.98 It is a debug layer that highlights roads and paths that end very close to each other, but aren't actually connected (i.e. don't share a node). As getting the connectivity right is essential for any successful routing application, these bug reports are quite important to fix in order to try and improve routing capabilities of OSM data. Overall, currently there are a lot of errors in connectivity. Some of them are import specific (county boundaries in TIGER?), but as one can see from the high number of bugs in Europe, broken connectivity is a fairly general problem. It would be great, if people could have a look at the routing debug layer in their area and start fixing the connectivity issues. One does have to be a little bit careful though, as there are a number of false positives. I.e. where roads end close to each other but truly aren't connected. E.g. because there is a wall between them. Most of the time one has a fairly good feeling though if it is a bug, or potentially isn't connected. Kai -- View this message in context: http://gis.638310.n2.nabble.com/OSM-inspector-routing-layer-now-also-available-in-the-US-tp6857217p6857217.html Sent from the USA mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
Re: [Talk-us] Ideas for OSMF US Swag
Thea Aldrich wrote: My two cents about the flyers. I really like the one produced by GeoFabrik. However, it might be nice to make a few tweeks to that model so its more US centric and plays better in this market. But thats just me... Great. Yes I too think a few tweeks to make it more US centric would be good, though, to make sure it attracts people in the US with their needs. -- View this message in context: http://gis.638310.n2.nabble.com/Ideas-for-OSMF-US-Swag-tp6408754p6414252.html Sent from the USA mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
Re: [Talk-us] Ideas for OSMF US Swag
Thea Aldrich wrote: Our question to the community is: If you like this idea, what types of branded materials would you like? I think it is a great idea and is the sort of thing a local chapter can be useful for to support the community and help spread the word. One thing that would imho be useful is to create flyers [1] to hand out to people who haven't heard about OSM to explain what OSM is about and why people should care to contribute. From what I have gathered, the German flyer [2] has been quite a success with apparently 40.000 flyers printed and distributed to date. There is now also an English flyer which the UK chapter distributes for free [3], but it only extends its offer to UK. So perhaps OSMF-US could print and distribute a similar flyer in the US, although it might be good to adapt it to fit the needs of the US better first. Kai [1] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Flyers_and_posters [2] http://www.openstreetmap.de/aktionen.html [3] http://shop.opencyclemap.org/products/openstreetmap-promotional-leaflets -- View this message in context: http://gis.638310.n2.nabble.com/Ideas-for-OSMF-US-Swag-tp6408754p6411371.html Sent from the USA mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
Re: [Talk-us] Another day, another bad import
Hi, Imports have gotten quite a bad reputation in the community as being more of a harm than a help. Partly this is for ideological reasons, opposing any form of import, but a good deal is also due to the fact that many imports are less than ideal on the technical execution side. We need to try and ensure that imports are of the highest possible standard, so that they do result in a net benefit to the map. So to all people importing data may I remind you to ensure that you at least stick to the general import guidlines http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Import/Guidelines Of the points listed there, I find particularly important (and often ignored): 1) Discuss your imports with the community. Let people check some sample data to allow to detect problems before damage is done to the map. 2) Document your imports on the wiki. Particularly make sure the import is listen in the import catalogue http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Import/Catalogue 3) Use a separate account for imports. It can make dealing with things like statistics, licensing problems or other large scale problems much easier if imports use separate user accounts from people normal mapping. It might also be worth watching Emilie Laffray's talk at SotM 2010 about the french effort of importing landcover data and all the steps they took to ensure the acceptance of the import and its quality and the lessons learnt. http://vimeo.com/14789967 Kai -- View this message in context: http://gis.638310.n2.nabble.com/Another-day-another-bad-import-tp6321661p6321809.html Sent from the USA mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
