I wanted to let you know that I have added Thailand as a region to the useful OSM Welcome Tool, developed by OpenStreetMap Belgium and supported by the Local Chapters and Communities Working Group.
The tool enables community members to monitor new users and manually send them a personalized welcome message with useful tips in their preferred language. The ultimate goal is to encourage new mappers to become regular contributors, thereby strengthening the local mapping community.
I’ve set up an initial version of the personalized welcome message in English, along with a Thai translation. I welcome any suggestions for improvements:
Thank you for this great initiative. How does it meanwhile go?
Was there any reply by the new user you contacted? How did they feel about it? Did they feel welcome? Did they feel getting the support from the community they are expecting? Is something missing for them?
In the past, there was very little known about mappers in Thailand. Majority of them had either been expats living there or foreigners on vacation and paid commercial mappers. I saw sporadically mapping events from universities, but I have not seen many of them staying on board with OSM.
This tool might help is to establish an early communication channel to provide assistance for a happy mapping experience. Learning curve of OSM is still quite steep and the way mapping is done has its challenges for newcomers.
Not great, actually. I quickly found out that the Welcome Tool isn’t working properly and isn’t being maintained at the moment.
However, I still managed to welcome a few more users manually. I received just a few positive responses, mostly from travelers in Thailand who contribute for a short period, which seems to represent a large portion of new contributors.
I noticed a few more users joining the forum and asking questions. It’s hard to tell how effective it is right now, since there’s no analytical tool to track views. I’m hoping to get the Welcome Tool up and running again so more messages can be sent out. Let’s see over the course of a year how this helps.
