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Building the community in South Florida

Byron South
Friday, 10:40am – 20 min
Levente Juhasz

I’m involved with Maptime Miami and I’m also working on my PhD at UF. With this talk, I’d like to showcase how an import event affects the contributor behavior of mappers with special emphasis on new mappers who got to know OSM through their coursework. With Maptime, we proposed a building import for Miami-Dade County and held a few meetups to engage the local community.

With the participation being low, I’ve decided to offer a bonus assignment for students in two graduate level course I’ve been helping to teach at UF (GIS Programming and GIS Analysis).

I this talk I’d like to focus on lessons learned and also to present the data analysis results of mapping behavior change (pre-import, import and post-import) of participants. This will reveal which tactics were most beneficial in the Miami area will also show which outreach methods worked best (direct contact with Meetups, online outreach of active users mapping in Miami or as part of a class).

For students I will also explore whether class participation affected the quality of contributed data.

Overall, the import improved Miami’s OSM quite a bit but engaging the community proved to be harder than expected.