User:Tallguy/Thoughts & ideas/feedback

Sending messages was prompted by my own experience. Although an experienced mapper I expected someone to look at what I had done & make sure it was okay, but it didn't seem to happen. I asked a question on the HOT mailing list, and received one or two answers, the basis of which was, it would be nice but who would do it.

Time consuming, but I think it's been worthwhile. Not everybody replies. At least 3 more people validating (one of whom had been away from HOT for months - they've also joined in on several other tasks, not involving the tracing of buildings). At least one person using JOSM has been introduced to 'building tools'.

The message sent has varied a little over time, but the principle is the same. I've validated at least one of your squares. Your mapping is good (I have sent other, carefully worded messages of encouragement in the event of problems). Thanks for helping & keep up the good work. When the validating section of the wiki was at what I considered to be an acceptable level, I added a section of the message about it.

When sending the message I didn't mention that I may share the results with others, so I've anonymised the replies.

April 2014 replies

• Hello Tallguy, thanks for your message and that wiki page with the screenshots (experiment on my part - User:Tallguy/Feedback/Feedback 01 ). It helps a lot and i hope i will improve my mapping. One question. Is every track (besides the main roads) inside a village/hamlet a residental or does the size matters? Thank you. Further message from me about highways in residential areas.
• Tallguy, Thank you for the feedback and the links. I'm glad to have those. You've prompted me to go back into http://learnosm.org/en/ and re-read and digest things more thoroughly. I will keep mapping for humanitarian causes and appreciate you taking an interest.
• Hi, I was wondering how I could better differentiate between unclassified highways, paths, and tracks in this part of Africa. (reply sent)
• Thank you, there are a lot of resources in this email I wasn't aware of and could certainly help me. I'll be looking forward to mapping more areas with HOT, and I'm excited to learn more about validating other tiles!
• Sorry, my english is very-very bad. (think this mapper was russian?)
• Hi, I'm sorry, but I'm not complete sure what you want to tell me with your e-mail. Should I focus my work for HOT rather on Valdidating than on intial mapping?

If you want more Mappers to validate, the TaskingManager might be a bit misleading: If a task is 100% done but 0% validated, it is shown as 100% complete. Best regards from Germany

• Thanx tallguy! Did a similar job when mapping big parts of Falkland islands some years ago that were to a great part terra incognita then. Will help more long when time allows.

March 2014 replies

• Thanks for the message Tallguy--definitely helps me stay engaged. I'll be working on HOTSM at the next OSM Edit-a-thon for sure.
• Hi Tallguy, I usually contribute to HOT since I feel it's the best and more helpful way to invest my time on the map and to improve my experience. Job #*** is where I'm currently working and the one that lately sufferered from a lack of interest among HOT users. Nevertheless I'll try to do my best to finish it, even if my free time is the main concern and the extension of the job does not help. Thanks for your effort in validating tasks.Regards
• Hi Tallguy, thank for your encouring feedback! Actually I would spend more efforts in HOT if there was not always the task to trace buildings. Tracing buildings is time-consuming and from remote you can only guess what is beneath the roof-shapes. I'm unsure in the results so I would prefer only to draw landuse=residental around inhabited areas. Regards from Germany

Further message from me suggesting alternatives - mapping task without buildings & link about validating Hi Nick, thanks again for your informations. Validation was a thing I didn't understand so far. To simply use the JOSM-inbuild validator is an idea which didn't came to me by myself. So from now I'll try to colour some of the red square green in future. The stage 2 validation seems to be quite a lot work. I don't know if I can get that. Especially mending broken or invalid relations of routes and borders is a bit difficult for me. But I will try... In the last days I did join the work in Guinea and will do so the coming days too.

• Hi Tallguy thank you for your message and usefull tips! Next time I will take care to consider them. Best Regards
• Hello, No, I'm no newcomer to osm, I just created an account for hot purposes. I'll update my profile to link it to my main one (*****). It is though my first contribution to the hot-process. The announcement arrived and I had some time, so I tried it. The tasking manager is quite easy to use, I still reported a suggestion on github, proposing to increase the map size. Coming from OSM, I find it far too small, even at hot, I like to choose my tasks knowing where I go. An increased map would be helpful.

I see there seems to be less people validating tasks than achieving them. If you think I can help, just say it. Is there some kind of documentation on how the validation process works, what needs to be checked in particular?

And you may see me around in the future, (follow up message from me & is now validating)

• Hi Tallguy,Thank you very much for the feedback! I'll download the buildings plugin for future use.

Kind regards,

• Thanks for the resources!
• - not quoted but a follow up message from someone who is now validating some squares querying one of the jobs - referred to Task owner.

February 2014 replies

• Thanks, Always glad to help out.
• It would be a pleasure but now I really lack of time. I travel extensively in ***** and it helps me a lot for reading satelite images.
• Hi, Thanks, I've started quite recently but I like this project a lot. So I plan to keep working on it :)
• Thanks, Yeah I have little bursts of doing HOT stuff. Nice to get a compliment. Cheers
• Thank you Tallguy, I am a geographer and used to this kind of work, and glad i could help and contribute to the mapping effort.