[contrapunctus]

Hey, author here. I guess this is something I should update the post to address.

I guess I have always been in the "agonizing over every detail" stage, and remain so today (looks like we both have mapping parties tomorrow, because tomorrow's our 7th party :) ).

In the beginning, we were much more "lax". We waited for latecomers. During the survey, we moved in one big group. We focused on the social aspect of the meetup - often, the meet-and-greet phase would go on for too long, and there wouldn't be much time spent in actual mapping. After each party, I would be disappointed to note that most people did not make significant map changes during the survey.

In the 5th party, we decided to observe a stricter schedule, and tried a new approach - that of splitting up into teams, assigning an area to each team, surveying the assigned areas, then regrouping and reviewing the contributions. There was a radical difference. Everyone was contributing. A significant amount of data was gathered, and the social aspect of the meetup didn't seem to suffer as we feared it might.

Delhi is very populous, but somehow there are very few OSM contributors here. [1] It's been a real struggle to get people interested in OSM, and even more of a struggle to keep them contributing in the long term. Most participants don't continue mapping after the mapping party/workshop. I prefer to think there's something off in my approach rather than in the people, because that gives me the energy to keep trying new things.

It's great that you're organizing mapping parties in your region. I laud your initiative. Good luck for your parties!

[1] India's OSM community seems to mostly be concentrated in the southern states. For the Delhi OSM community, Bangalore remains our inspiration both for OSM coverage and for mapping party productivity.

[pietervdvn]

In all communities, your gonna have churn and only a small percentage that is gonna continue contributing.

In Belgium, we've done some active community building. A chat channel helps, but regular meetups too - often these are just sitting in a bar or in a cozy place and discussing everything that is related to OpenStreetMap.

It also helps that quite a few have jobs in or at least using OpenStreetMap.

[orblivion]

Yeah once I get to the point you're describing I will think about rules and details again. And I will keep your blog post handy. I just think I've just been optimizing prematurely. I have to get a sense of the failure modes before I start making too many rules. I end up spending energy on the wrong thing and get frustrated when it doesn't work anyway. I'm also doing something much simpler than you guys. Good lord, laser distance meters!? I'll be happy to number the houses in town and add all the restaurants and stuff for now :-)

BTW I'm also not just targeting newcomers, I'm also trying to gather a community among the existing local editors. It's just something I enjoy doing and it would be fun to do with more people.

As for the low numbers of newcomers - I could reach out more. There's a local tech scene slowly coalescing in my area. Once I have regular mapping meetups I'll be able to invite people at the wider tech meetups here with more confidence. (For existing editors, I should spend more time combing local edits, that's worked so far)