Congratulations to you and your team, looks very promising! Are you (or do you know if other people are) planning to do a similar work on buildings pre-mapping? I’ve seen a huge number of companies and researches working on that, but none were close to operational use like you are here for roads…

Thanks Joost for the analysis! Interesting to see that the French community “surge” has easily allowed to move from a severely under-representation for being one of the (proportionally) well represented communities. This will of course not apply for countries where cost of membership or means of payments are a problem (cf. the ongoing discussion) but it means that a simple message encouraging people to join (like Christian did) can already bring a lot of new members in “Northern” countries. I’m not on the OSM US list but maybe that’s just what they did at some point? (I’m not good at conspiracies when I can find simple explanations, sorry :-p )

Ah and good luck with the election Joost ;-)

Sorry I messed up the formatting, my message is kind of hard to read! Typical Missing maps OSM newbie actiom :-D

Hi Simon,

Thanks for the very interesting feedback! Just a quick answer on my perception of these elements: * Siloization: I totally agree that would be a bad consequence of Missing Maps and it’s precisely something we do our best to avoid. Each time we run a mapathon in France we try to have someone from the local OSM community presenting the whole OSM project and the activities of his local group before the mapathon. Since MM is by definition a humanitarian project we cannot really go further than this (and organize mapping parties on local topics) however I think we are exposing OSM to many people that would have never heard of it else, so as a genuine OSM enthusiast I think it’s already a good start! I’m certain if you ask the French OSM chapter they would not complain about MM, in fact several of them are already involved in the project! * Sending feedback to contributors on how their work have been used is one of our key challenge currently, and although we can still certainly improve a lot we have already taken some interesting steps, such as having live intervention from field staff to explain how they’ll use the data, or sending messages to task contribution with links with the products we were able to prepare for NGOs thanks to OSM. Feedback are always welcome on this process BTW. Gamificaction is not our specialty so I’ll leave other MM members answer to that since I don’t really understand the problem. * Overselling the positive effects of our work is always a risk, specially for CartONG since we are the only technical-only member of MM. The only thing we can sell is this tiny bit of support we can bring to NGOs that already did their job very well without us, but we still think it is a worthy element of the humanitarian effort. I encourage you to read the case studies we did with MSF that demonstrates well - I think - the positive impact of GIS and mapping during the Ebola response, on which OSM was instrumental I’d be interested to be pointed out the crying babies on our website, we have a strict policy against it: http://cartong.org/ ;-) * Humanitarian OSM activities have brought a huge spotlight on OSM I think, it adds a nice touch (just like mapping parties on accessibility or bicycles are a great way to communicate on how the vast OSM database can be useful to many purposes) to our overall comm’ as an ecosystem. CartONG members are also always keen to communicate on OSM as a whole whenever we have an opportunity and are often members of their local chapter too so this distinction doesn’t really make sense to us. In fact, as the comm’ person at CartONG I am sometimes frustrated how little exposure we get as an organization compared to our friends of the OSM and HOT communities :-) * As of the efficiency question, it is not really one for us: since bringing new contributors and make them discover OSM is precisely one of our objectives, we are willing to do the effort to support them and train them. I actually find your argument a bit contradictory with item #1? We are also trying to create a process to get our volunteers to more advanced OSM and mapping tasks (validation, data integration, etc.) via our own projects with our partners (not necessarily MM). This is the great strength of OSM in my opinion: we are not facing a limited resource we need to share (will it be volunteers or data), we are expanding together a mutually beneficial for all open ecosystem.