Welcoming new mappers

TLDR: It’s now super easy to welcome new mappers in your country or region. Just post an issue at the Welcome tool repository, and we’ll set you up. New mappers will be listed and in a few clicks you can check their work and welcome them with a localized welcome message. You can share the workload, as it will be clear who is and who hasn’t been contacted. Try it out at https://welcome.osm.be/ (don’t forget to connect your OSM account). Instructions on how to request your region available here.

About the tool

Back when we started doing real life meetings in Belgium, one of the first frustrations was how hard it was to get in touch with mappers. How do you let mappers know there’s a group of locals who are eager to get to know them? And how do we offer a helping hand to new mappers?

Of course, the first thing you think about is automating, plugging in to the global OSM software. But that software evolves slowly and you’d have to come up with a solution that works worldwide from the start.

So we decided to go for a simple solution: Belgian mapper M!dgard built a simple tool in PHP around Pascal Neis’s RSS feed of new mappers. M!dgard never stopped hating the ugly coding, but it did do the job for several years - with Jakka doing most of the welcoming work.

Don’t expect welcoming new mappers to be very rewarding. Most new mappers are never going to stick around, so just a few percent will ever answer you. Statistically speaking, there doesn’t seem to be an impact on mapper retention either. But we always felt that it does help people to find their way in the documentation and in the communication channels. Not in the least, we used the tool to monitor the edits of new mappers. That helped us spot errors as well as occasional vandalism.

Of course, Belgium wasn’t the only country that had this issue. People all over the world had similar workflows, sometimes a tool of their own. But the Belgian tool was not exactly scalable. So this became a priority of the LCCWG as soon it was restarted: how can we combine the efforts being made locally to create a solution that works for everyone everywhere.

It remained on the todo list until Jonathan Beliën (OSM Belgium board member, who also built the Road Completion project software) joined the LCCWG and decided this was a problem he could fix. He rebuilt the tool from scratch, with the input collected through the LCCWG. The tool does what it needs to do, and it’s really easy to request your own region to be set up.

The new tool is using the power of OSMCha and the OpenStreetMap API to detect new users and get information that could be useful to the people welcoming the new mappers. New mappers are added daily, based on the region (country, state, city, …) where they made their first contribution.

We are very pleased that even with minimal promotion through the LCCWG network, the tool has already been set up for quite a few regions and countries!

How to use it

Have a look at the welcome screen to see if your region is already included (if it’s not, request it here):

On the region page, you get a nice overview of the most recent new mappers. The little graph shows how much work is left to be done. Make sure you connect your OSM account at this point.

If your account is connected, you’ll be able to send a message. If you don’t see any text there, that means that there is no default welcome message yet for your region. If there’s none, request it here. If your country is multilingual, you can have default messages in several languages. The tool will try and guess the language of the mapper!

When you click “Send message”, it will open a new tab on openstreetmap.org where you only have to click “send”.

The tool itself cannot send the message, since the OSM api does not allow messages from external parties. That means that you need to go back to the screen below and mark the mapper as “has been welcomed”. While you’re at it, it’s a good idea to also review the changeset of the mapper. The review status will be fetched from OSMcha at the next update. An explicit slider to mark “I have checked the edits of this mapper” will be added to the tool soon.

Happy welcoming,
Jonathan Beliën & Joost Schouppe
for the LCCWG