Organised mapping activities in North Wales

Andy from the DWG here - just for info, an activity has appeared in the “organised activities” list which seems to be arranging for some remote mapping in parts of Wales.

I spotted it because the quality of some of the edits was not great - they resulted in breakage of one of an “Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty”, and a quick scan of other similar edits nearby suggested other problems too. That’s not entirely unheard of with poorly-organised remote mapping activities - sometimes it means that the people doing the mapping (often remote, and new to OSM) are left to struggle without appropriate guidance. There have been issues with previous activities from this organiser.

The suggested changeset hashtags are “#cydnerthedd #resilience #GreenWales #hotosm-project-16144 #hotosm-project-16143 #hotosm-project-16141 #hotosm-project-15943” - if anyone wants a list of changesets containing those, let me know.

It’s a little difficult to comment on what is actually being organised since the wiki page mostly contains sentences such as

The project also aims to capacitate academic and professional communities in Wales to leverage the unique advantages of OpenStreetMap Community Mapping in generating innovative community-derived heritage, municipal, demographic and cultural layers: a ‘deep-map’ of community values in Wales.

I suspect that the author used that form of language (e.g. “capacitate” rather than something like “provide tools that people can use to solve problems”) either because (a) they thought it made them seem intelligent (it had quite the reverse effect on me) or (b) they’re taking the proverbial out of the whole process.

Whatever the reason for this activity, I’d suggest that people (especially those on the ground - whether locals, visitors, or just passing through on the way to the ferry port, keep an eye on things. If anyone needs to mail the DWG directly about it, they can email data@openstreetmap.org with a subject line of “[Ticket#2024042810000145] Project 16144 etc.”.

Sounds like an approximation of word salad pulled out of the proverbial to me.

They appear to be doing a project to trace all the buildings in the target area, although why that needs to be obfuscated quite so heavily by seemingly endless bureaucrat-ese is beyond me. Perhaps it is a chronic condition afflicting those with the unfortunate duty of distracting funding bodies with verbal and textual chaff for sufficient time as to distract them wholly, or partly, from any reason they might somehow construct for themselves in order to coherently rebuff an inevitable request that they might receive to part from them some portion of their available funds which they have been required to advertise as being available for certain purposes, but whose dispersal would, despite being the successful culmination of the earmarked purpose, nevertheless temporarily diminish the prestige associated thereto by virtue of a decrease in the overall magnitude of the funds that may be advertised for dispersal.

At any rate, the use of pure addr:housenumber, addr:housename and addr:street for the tagging of named terraces seems like it doesn’t really take account of more recent tagging discussions. I thought we were now using addr:substreet for this sort of thing to allow for situations where there is a named house within a named terrace? Or am I mistaking a proposal for current practice?

If they really are planning on getting people out there to with StreetComplete then that could be beneficial for address coverage.

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I assume you are talking about Changeset: 150343317 | OpenStreetMap? Is there anything to suggest they have anything todo with the project? Their list of edits suggest to me that they have nothing to do with wales and simply found the project listed on the tasking manager.

Relations get broken all the time, it’s a shame, but recommending an iD user use JOSM doesn’t seem like it will get us anywhere.

Thanks for catching and fixing the broken relation though.

The list of hashtags suggested it was this project.

It may indeed be that they “just found the project in the tasking manager” but it is surely incumbent on the project creator to make sure that (a) the right people get to participate and (b) their edits are checked afterwards.

An additional bit of fun, if you click on links to their task manager tasks under " Initial AOI (Geographical Area of Interest)" they just say:

You are not allowed to edit this project.

edit: the links in the hashtags do work, and I got told “You are not ready to work on this project” when I actually tried to do a task. From that I’d say that any mapping problems that turn up in changesets with those hashtags are probably the result of the actual team and not any interlopers who just happened to click on something that looked interesting.

a) I don’t use the tasking manager much, but AFAIK it’s designed to collaboration. Much like OSM, everyone is welcome, and encouraged, to edit. OSM isn’t ours, it’s everyones.

b) I don’t use the tasking manager much, but AFAIK the validation stage happens after the mapping stage. I wouldn’t expect every changeset validated as it happens, an expectation for it to be done within 3 days is certainly unrealistic.

Oh you didn’t fix it. Facebook did. Thanks to the faceless Facebook mapper if you read this thread.

I commented on the problem changeset and tried to help the original mapper to fix it. Unfortunately, communication did not occur. Fixing the data is the easy bit (for someone who knows what they’re doing); getting new OSM mappers to the stage where they don’t break stuff is hard.

If you’re organising a mapping activity the key word there is “organise” - you need to actually do something beyond adding a request to an online tasking manager and collecting your cheque from the sponsoring body.

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