Comment by bhousel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bhousel | Hacker News Reader

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> And it has a barrier to entry - you have to be a tiny bit nerdy to confidently make edits.

Serious question - what can we do to lower these barriers to entry? Friendlier community norms? Documentation / tools? Social stuff (groups, meetups, etc?)

I'd love to hear people's experiences on contributing, and your honest feedback. I'm one of the "core" members of OSM (I maintain the iD editor) and we're always looking for ways to improve the new user experience.

> Personally, I think a good intermediate step will be to embed better and more automated review processes.

I agree! For now, most review is done manually by volunteers. We're looking for ways to make this process more efficient.

If you haven't already, check out the OSMCha changeset review tool: https://osmcha.mapbox.com/

It runs some checks against every changeset as they occur, and presents a newsfeed-style list for anybody to review. It also has filters, in case you are interested only in certain geographic regions.

I recently started mapping, and scaled the learning curve that surprised me how high it is. I downloaded streetcomplete and Vespucci for my phone, but when I came to a road (on my bike) that didn't exist on the map it wasn't obvious to me how to add it (I still don't know how to do it on either app).

When I finally hopped on my desktop computer and did the iD tutorial, a lot of things became much easier. I learned how to add roads and buildings, and started doing so. Then I noticed that my map software (osmAnd) didn't announce my freeway exits.

To figure out how to mark freeway exits properly was terrible. I found the motorway wiki page and the motorway link page, but from those pages I didn't feel like I could tag an exit properly still. When I finally found the exit_info page things made a little more sense why they are confusing: there are conflicting ways of doing it! I started tagging freeway exits near me.

One thing that would have been helpful for me (although would probably be a bit of work to implement) would be more overview-level tools. Like "I want to..." a) add a missing building, b) tag a freeway exit, c) give addresses to these buildings, etc. Granted, some of this is already done. I suppose it's really the exit tagging that is a new example.

I also have been worrying about my changes being erroneously modified by other people, without a way to "take ownership" of an area and be notified of changes- I will take a good look at that OSMCha change set tool.

>Serious question - what can we do to lower these barriers to entry? Friendlier community norms? Documentation / tools? Social stuff (groups, meetups, etc?)

You can't edit while wasting time on the computer. You have to actually go to places you want to add. It makes scaling hard.

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