On Tue, Apr 15, 2014 at 4:20 PM, Martijn van Exel <mart...@openstreetmap.us> wrote: > Hi all, > > I want to thank all of you who were able to make it to DC this past weekend > for coming to SOTM US. I had a great time and that was in no small part > because I was able to get together with some of the folks here on this list.
I'd like to echo Martijn. .MARTIJN. .Martijn. .martijn. Martijn is a fine example of the type of person who made my trip to DC so enjoyable. I had a great time establishing and renewing friendships with other mappers. It was super to put some faces to the names, email addresses and 'handles' of some of the folks on this list. Thanks again, Martijn, and those of you who's ears I bent. :-) Thanks, too, to the event volunteers. If there were any organizational problems at the event, I wasn't aware of them. The schedule was mostly on time, without appearing too rigid or too regimented. Plenty of hot beverages were available in the hallway throughout the event. In addition to enjoying technical presentations and chatting during the breaks, I had the opportunity to speak to many people who were new enough to OpenStreetMap that they hadn't yet improved the data in their neighbourhood. I think this deserves a call to action. So here I go. I'd like to see more direct advocacy to become a regular mapper of your neighbourhood at events like this in future. That neighbourhood mapper / maintainer is an ideal primary goal for OpenStreetMap. I suggest that any city or state that can boast of "A Mapper on Every Block" is a city or state that is perfectly mapped and always up to date. We aren't there yet and so we'd best work harder at it. It was great to see the tutorial for new mappers during the morning of day one. The room was packed to over capacity when I peeked in. Surely offering that same tutorial morning and afternoon of each day would have provided opportunity to convert more of those potential mappers into mappers. It is a missed opportunity to send some potential mappers home without some coaching after they have travelled to a conference to learn more about OpenStreetMap. One of the goals of this event appears to have been to reach out to those who are merely consumers of OpenStreetMap data, based on the number of people there who were consuming OpenStreetMap data but had never edited to improve it. Surely a primary goal of an advocacy group that seeks to benefit OpenStreetMap must be to turn those consumers into contributors? By turning a consumer into a contributor, the data benefits from their local knowledge and thus we all benefit from improved data. I suggest that turning a consumer into contributor also makes that consumer into a better educated consumer. Surely data consumers are better able to understand and appreciate the OpenStreetMap data that they consume once they participate in and understand the methods to collect and contribute that data. A better-informed consumer is surely slightly better for OpenStreetMap. If that consumer also becomes a contributor it is clearly better for OpenStreetMap. So that's my call to action. Let's aim to allow every attendee to edit OpenStreetMap if they haven't done so previously. It would be wonderful to see a much higher percentage of technical talks and a higher percentage of community focused talks. _______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
