Connect newcomers to the existing community

[bgirardot]

Try to connect newcomers to the existing community as soon as possible, and in a setting that is appropriate for absolute beginners. Where can people ask questions online? Is the mailing list still appropriate for absolute beginners?

Martin Dittus

[joostschouppe]

Thinking this through to the very beginning: one way could be to have a chatbox within iD. When you open ID from the tasking manager, the chatbox is set to a channel for the current task. Of course, admins could be there too. During mapathons it would help find "this one user who is mapping highway=road" (for example if ID activates the chatbox if the current user is being at-mentioned). It could make the whole mapathon experience more social too.
Outside of the tasking manager, the channel could include people mapping nearby now; or integrate with existing OSM messaging tool for people who edited closeby.

[joostschouppe]

In Belgium, we try to connect new contributors with our Welcome message program. It uses an RSS feed of people whose first edit was in Belgium. Here, it could be "people whose first edit was within the tasking manager". I'm sure Pascal Neis could help set that up. So you could simply reuse our code (or help making it better :) ). Of course, Martin seemed to be referring more to the content of the welcome message, rather than getting such a message itself.

[bgirardot]

small chatbox in id, almost exactly like great josm plugin geochat? I forget the name but it is great.

this keeps coming up and is a good idea, but you need someone always there answering questions. I am thinking just embed the hot irc channel in a chat box in iD, I am there a lot and we could make an effort to get more folks there, especially since irc is integrated in to slack already.

[logrady]

I thought of JOSM's Geochat. I used to have it active but I never saw anyone else in there after a few months so I closed as it was just taking up screen space.

If the beginners all took a small intro course in an elearning application they could use (and re-use) the threaded discussion forum from the course. It would become like a repository where correctly answered questions could be preserved for future use like forum.openstreetmap.org or OSM on GIS Stack Exchange. Of course either of these could be utilized but I think something that new uses are either already comfortable with like the message forum from their recently completed intro course or something embedded in either iD or the TM would likely have a better uptake if questions asked are answered in a timely fashion. Also we don't want to be redirecting new users all over the place. It's confusing and may lead to poor retention, which is already an issue.

[aawiseman]

The chatbox idea was mentioned at the SOTM-Brussels too, and/or some way to message everybody in the task: "don't forget to square your buildings" or other task-specific reminders.