Organised Editing/Activities/Notes resolution in Latam

Rationale

As part of the first Latam meeting in 2022, it was decided that the MaptimeBogota team from Colombia will hold monthly meetings to resolve notes in all Latin American countries.

The team will try to schedule a meeting every first Saturday of the month, inviting the whole Latam community (At the beginning was the last Saturday, but it created conflicts with the Latam meeting).

The purpose is to improve the region in open notes terms, because many countries have very old open ones, and the map could become obsolete for not resolving them.

This initiative was already done in Colombia, where all open notes were closed by the end of 2021. A similar situation occurred in Chile where they have closed all old notes.

The notes are the best way of interaction between a map user (who does not know how to map) and the mappers (especially those in armchairs).

In this way, the user's feedback will be easily translated into a map improvement, and the user will see that his comment/feedback was processed; in other words, he was heard, and most probably he will continue to send feedback.

This article describe the project: ES:Latam/Resolución de notas(es).

Contact

You can contact the team by Telegram: https://t.me/osm_notes_latam. As this project is part of OSM Latam community, you can also contact them by: https://t.me/OSMLatam.

Another way to contact the person who processed a note is by commenting the changesets or the closed note.

Community Consultation

The community was aware of this initiative, as it was accepted as part of the first 2022 meeting. Also, it was announced in the Telegram channel //t.me/OSMLatam and by mail in talk latam mailing list.

Each time a Notathon event is programmed, the Latam community is invited. These events aim to resolve notes together between the different members of each local community.

Hashtag

The hashtag used in our commits as well as the comment when closing the notes is: #ONL

It means Open Notes Latam.

As part of the note's comment, we also include a link to a dedicated page of the notes in the wiki, as well as the Telegram channel. This could help to engage people to continue contributing with notes, or even become mappers.

Timeframe

We started this initiative in February 2022. However, from one side, the quantity of currently open notes in the whole Latam is too big. From the other side, there are thousand of notes created monthly. For these reasons, this could be considered as a permanent activity as part of the OSM Latam community.

Tools and Data Sources

We are using different tools to identify the notes and close them:

• https://resultmaps.neis-one.org/osm-notes - In this page, we can see the quantity of open notes per country.
• JOSM is one tool to close notes, because one can download notes from an area. Also, by using the continuously download plugin, it ease the OSM data download.
• iD could also be used to close the notes. It is necessary to add the Notes layer to see the open ones.
• RSS feeders are being used to identify the new notes in different areas. This is being used because the community is taking control of its own local areas.

Participants

The members of the team are:

• AngocA (on osm, edits, contrib, heatmap, chngset com.)
• risturiz (on osm, edits, contrib, heatmap, chngset com.)
• dcruizr (on osm, edits, contrib, heatmap, chngset com.)
• matheusgomesms (on osm, edits, contrib, heatmap, chngset com.)
• mapeadora (on osm, edits, contrib, heatmap, chngset com.)

Measuring our Success

We continuously measure our progress with the Neis Pascal page, where we can see how many old notes are still open in different Latam countries, and how many have been closed. Also, it allows us to identify the mappers who continuously are adding notes, which is a good thing, because they are contributing with the map from the ground.

Finally, we also see the quantity of reopened notes, to identify problems while solving the notes.

Training/Instructions

Each first Saturday of the month, we are holding meetings at OSM-BigBlueButton, scheduled via Meetup. In these meetings we give instructions about how to resolve notes.

The sessions are being saved and published in the MaptimeBogota's YouTube channel, for future consultation.

Post-Event Clean Up

There are not post-event clean up activities defined yet.

Results

The results will be seen with the Pascal Neis page, where we will see that the C/O ratio will be increased in all Latam countries.