How would you measure OSM UK?
Jez Nicholson
Public
Seen by 52
I'm collecting ideas on how to measure how successful OSM is in the UK. How would you, personally, measure 'success'?
A number of measures already exist, what are they?
The whole thing can be flawed. 'Success' is a subjective term. No single measure tells the whole story, and many numbers can be misinterpreted. But let's see if it possible to find some figures that can guide us.
Suggest some and i'll collate them into a dot vote or similar.
Criticism of a measure is welcome, but please be gentle.
RobJN Thu 25 Oct 2018 10:19PM
So I think we should be looking for a monthly report and it it probably easier to start with stats about the community of mappers. Some ideas:
- Number of people mapping within each month. -- Sub-level splits by experience level (e.g. new mapper, infrequent, junior, senior, gold); or -- Sub-level splits by activity (e.g. how many of the total number of people mapping each month did just 1 edit, 2-10 edits, 10+ edits).
It might also be worth splitting this by region (England, Scotland, Wales, NI, Isle of Man, CI).
We may also want to pull out a stat specifically about new mappers and/or experienced mappers who have no contributed recently.
Of the tools identified so far, Neis-One has the user categories (new mapper, infrequent, junior, senior, gold). It also has the OSMStats website which shows number of mappers per day. It also has stats about the top 500 mappers in the UK in the last 2 months. The OSMAnd Live tool also has good user stats by month.
The following are less useful: Meet Your Mapper seems too complex as it only runs on small areas and gives you everything back to the start of time. It does include last edit from each user for the selected geographic region though. Ohsome seems to be just Germany and Nepal for now. It feels like this will be better when it comes to measuring the data completeness rather than the community. For MissingMaps the stats are ok but it must be filtering somehow as I cannot find myself in it. Finally, osm-estratti.wmflabs.org is Italy only.
How to continue? I suggest mocking up a dashboard so that we have a visual idea of what we are aiming for. We can then see if we can do this on our own or if it is worth asking Pascal Neis and/or OSMAnd for some help.
Once we have this done, we may want other metrics about community. For example, number of users subscribed to our social media.
After that it becomes harder and I feel we should engage with others to try to figure out stats of map accuracy / completeness. For now Robert Whittakers work is great for UK theme specific projects.
Nick Ananin Wed 26 Aug 2020 8:56AM
Looking at the articles - one of the objects is to "promote and facilitate the use of OpenStreetMap data by individuals and organisations in the United Kingdom". Perhaps a measure of this is to have a record (list) of organisations using OSM maps in the UK. Perhaps as a starting point why not publish on our web site all the sites that we know of that are using OSM maps relevant to the UK i.e filter/review the list shown at https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/They_are_using_OpenStreetMap but also add to it e.g. http://marine.gov.scot/maps/1112, http://www.britainfromabove.org.uk/ etc. That would provide a measure of usage and might be of interest to other users/mappers
RobJN · Tue 16 Oct 2018 5:25PM
I started a chat about this with other local groups via their telegram/IRC/riot supergroup. A few other suggestions but not all covered UK.