"How to Become an OpenStreetMap Meetup Host." By: Clifford Snow. >> Good afternoon. Is everybody having a good time? So I'm Clifford Snow, one of the organizers will blame me for anything that's bad. Anything that went rail, that was all Chase's doing. I do have one announcement. I'm looking for Javier, if he could see me after the talk, nothing serious. He knows what it's about. But if you know him, have him look me up, would you please? So anyway my name is Clifford Snow, and I am one of the two meet up hosts here in Seattle. Chase is the other one. And I don't know how to work that. So I'm here to talk about trying to increase the number of people mapping in the United States. We have a real problem in the United States. We just don't have enough mappers. We could use a whole lot more. So my purpose is to encourage you all to go out and start Meetup groups in the neighborhoods and the rural areas and try to increase the number of mappers. It will help us educate new mappers. Because, you know, really some of the people that learn by themselves, they make an awful lot of mistakes. If we were to give them a nice, gentle hands on approach showing them how to use ID, we're going to see a lot less errors, a lot less to cleanup. We can assist with humanitarian efforts because we'll have a built in crew of people that can edit. And we'll just build a stronger community. Here in Seattle, we use it to help us do a number of different imports that really increased the strength of our community, and we wouldn't have been able to put this whole conference on without the fact that we have a huge base of people to draw on. So a little bit about me. I have been a mapper since May of 2011. I only know that because it says so on my profile on OpenStreetMap. I ran into OpenStreetMap by accident. I was at a Linux fest up in Bellingham for those of you who know about it. It's a great place to go. And I had nothing else to do, so I went and heard Hurricane talk about OpenStreetMap. I started -- I joined the Meetup group and then, Steve, moved to Colorado and said, Clifford, how would you like to host the Meetup group? And it's, like, no. I'm a little nervous about that. I was pretty new. But Chase and I took over from Steven Hurricane. I honestly don't remember when -- do you remember, Chase? Yeah, 2013, something like that? Anyway, I'm also active in CUGOS, which is the local geo group, we have a large contingent of people in the PGIS group. And I also have three Meetup groups that I host kind of would you say. This Seattle OSM one, the Vancouver, and the north. I have a lot of work to do on those other two. And I'm going to see if I can actually get them going. So our Meetup group was created all the way back in 2008. I just ran into Steve, and I said, Steve, when did you start this group? And he said "I think it was between 2008, 2009." So he had a really good memory. Started in 2008 by Steven Hurricane. Chase and I went to a whole lot of meet-ups with them, but they setup and we did east side and Seattle area. And then we took over, and we've been working on it ever since as a partner. This is -- really takes a lot of work, so having two people is great. Chase, thank you very much. Shortly -- and we've already talked. We're asking some of our more active members to become part of a leadership team, which I think is going to help us work through some of the issues as we continue to grow. And Chase and I then could take more breathers and not have to run every Meetup that we have. I put this slide together, and I said we have over 500 members. We are now over 600 members. And it's just amazing. We've done 82 meet-ups since the group formed. Sometimes we do just one a month. Other times we do multiple ones a month. I don't know how well you can see this, but this is the chart up to when we were at 500 something. As you can see it took a while to get there, but once we really got going and started running a lot of meet-ups, the growth really expanded. And I'm going to tell you a little secret. Most of those people you never hear from. I look at the other meet-ups that they belong to, they belong to 20 and 30 something singles looking to date. And I -- we've been trying to figure out how do we have a dating service out of OSM, if anybody has any good ideas, please tell me. I think we can increase the population of mappers. [Laughter] Tenfold. So Meetup. So what is Meetup? This is right off of their Web page. They're the world's largest organization or company that provides a service that -- I mean there's hundreds and hundreds of thousands maybe of Meetup groups. The nice thing about Meetup is it's a way for people to find you. And OpenStreetMap does a really good job if you are GIS centric. Most everybody in GIS has heard of OpenStreetMap. But it would be nice to get to regular people. People have other interests -- people -- let's see. What did I talk to? I was talking to the officers that are roaming around the campus here. They were curious about OpenStreetMap, and I was just explaining how we have mapped every one of those emergency call buttons that you see on campus. And one of the officers says wow, you know, we could put all of our defibrillators on there where they're located. And I said that's a great idea. That's the purpose of OpenStreetMap is for you to go capture data that you're interested in. That somebody else is -- is going to be helpful to somebody else. So that's the purpose of Meetup. People find you on there. Meetup is free. Kind of. It's free for most of the groups. We're going to talk about charging here in the next slide. Like I said it's really easy for people to find you. And one of the things I really like is local. It's your community. So if you create a Meetup group, you know, wherever you're from, the people in the 50-mile radius are going to find you. And that's how you're going to start building your community is just people finding you, curious about what it's about. And then actually running a lot of meet-ups and put lots of pictures up there. It has great communications tools. You can e-mail everybody, there's a discussion group, you can do file sharing, you can do photo sharing. We love to post photos of before and after Meetup OSM apps. It's really fun to see the difference. And of course you can schedule a Meetup. Now, fees. So Meetup charges $15 a month to an organizer. So I pay $15 a month and for that, I get to have three Meetup groups. So I have Seattle, Vancouver, and north you can also charge for it. Or you can have somebody -- there's a chip in button. Where people can -- if they just want to give some money. I haven't found it very useful. I belong to the GIS Meetup group, and the organizer of that decided he would charge. And this is what our membership looked like afterwards. If you want to get information to people, get people interested in OSM, I don't -- don't charge. It's just going to drive them away. So there's a -- another option. There's something called Meetup pro. And this part I'm going to really talk to Meetup. I've been talking to Meetup, our board members on the U.S. chapter have been talking to Meetup, the company. They offer a feature called Meetup pro. It's really great. They will send a bill to, like, chapter, they can pay it, and then you can run your Meetup and not have to worry about $15 a month coming out of your pocket. One of the nice things about it, you can send e-mails to everybody. So if we were going to have a mapathon -- if we wanted to do a fix of roads in the United States and have a mapathon all over, we could send a notice to everybody that's in Meetup and get them to join mapathon. That would be a cool features for us to have. But here's the disadvantage. And, Meetup, please listen. It's three times as expensive as the regular Meetup. It costs you $15 for every Meetup group that you would fund on Meetup pro. And that to me is just ridiculous for one added feature as far as I can tell is the ability to send messages to everybody. It should be cheaper. You've got to find a different pricing model. The second thing is give me a break. Give us OSM base maps. I really want you to have OSM base maps. The good news? I'll save you enough money on your licensing fees with that other company that you won't have to charge so much. Okay. End of plug. Building memberships. So here's how you do it. You just wait. People will join your Meetup. I've been trying that in Vancouver and north, it's really slow. It's like that chart I showed you. That long tail. I'll be -- I'm old now. I'll be really old before we have enough members to make something worthwhile. So here's what I recommend. Go join other meet-ups open geo,colt for America, groups that you think might be interested in you. Most likely your state has a Urisa chapter, go to the Urisa with, all I do is pitch OSM. Talk to your city and county and GIS people. Most of them love you. My town tells me a story that he's the local GIS guy says I was out, I wanted to fix this trail with mapmaker, so I was out there, and I put the change in, and they said, no, that's not right. And he says I was just there. I'm a professional. I said come to OSM, you can put it in, and I guarantee you we'll take it. Invite mappers. We're going to talk about that. And do community projects. One of the big things we did for building membership here is we did the Seattle building import. And Seattle building import I don't know how many people we got, but we increase our membership hugely when we did that. We got brand-new people and that really helped us. And most of them are really pretty good mappers. And there's some very active mappers that are still left from that group. Some other things. I haven't done this yet. But 4H clubs, future farmers of America, scouting organizations, I have talked to my local chamber of commerce in Mount Vernon, not officially but just talked to them. I've done presentations at Linux groups. Chase I think was at a makers fair here in Seattle. I bet you guys know some others. So who else would you guys recommend we hit? Geocaching. Yeah, good one. There's a huge market of Geocachers. I just ran into some the other day. Any other obvious ones? Pardon? Pokémon. Yeah, they're everywhere, aren't they? If we can figure that one out, we would have the world mapped. One of the real obvious ones is bike clubs. Perfect example. So if you think of more, please tell me. I would love to get a bigger list. And then invite mappers. One of the problems with OpenStreetMap is we can only invite one person at a time through the system. And it's really cumbersome. We sent out a couple of days before the conference, we had a whole group of people in the hall, and we sent out a message to each one of them at a time. It took a while. We had 50? It took a while one at a time. We need better tools than that in OSM. [Question from crowd] >> So Steve just mentioned that there's apparently -- I missed that e-mail, but I've been busy with something else. I've been kind of tied up. Just been going through kind of fast. But I'll go look for that, but thanks, Steve. And then finding new mappers. So here's some of the tools. This is from Neil, this is who's around me. And the website is on there. So you can go find it. So this is -- contact those people. Some of them may be inactive, but you never know. They may want to get back into it. Here's his newest mappers. This is a neat tool, so you can go into your area, and you can find out who the in last seven days has started mapping in there. This is a great way to find new people, and we'll get that more in a second here. There's an IRC bot that if you didn't know this, every time somebody writes a note or every time there's a new editor, it comes up in the IRC channel. And it -- they now have it everything in the world on one channel, and it's amazing to watch this thing feed. There's a lot of activity. So I actually have a script that goes and captures new people, and I actually like this way of getting because it's mechanized, I don't have to actually do anything. But it's a great tool. And then I -- every new mapper in Washington, I send out a welcome message. And I would like to tell you I wrote this originally, but in reality this came from the Belgium community. In the U.S., we have it pretty easy. We only have to do it in one language. I think Belgium has three or four languages on theirs. Yeah, four. How many people from Canada here? Okay. We have one from Canada. So you need to do two languages in Canada. Yeah, and if you're Canadian -- I mean if your French is as bad as mine when I took it up there, I wish you luck. So my slides will be available, you can copy mine. You can go to the Belgium community, they are really happy to share. Scheduling. We do mapping hours, mapping parties, and mapathons with Missing Maps. Try to find the library, a coffee shop, or university. If it's mapy hour, that's where you sit and drink and talk about your mappings. Those are some of the best turnouts. Those and the Missing Maps are our biggest events by far. And they're a lot of fun. And I will give a plug for King County and Seattle libraries. They have great meeting spaces. They're nice, they're well maintained, the Internet's fast. So, yeah, thank you, King County. Thank you, Seattle libraries. Pick a location that needs some care. So just look for business centers around town, parks, universities, use tools like field papers. I personally like pencil and paper. For apps, there is nothing better than GoMap. Bryce, are you in here? So GoMap is developed by Bryce Cogswell here from Kirkland, and it is by far the best map out there for Android -- or iOS devices. Unfortunately, I have Android. Pair up inexperienced people with experienced people. It really helps people feel better about it. And then the nice thing about that is it's kind of a learning experience and when you teach somebody else, you learn it better. And then time to come back and review the data and enter it, and then help the new mappers get started with ID. I gave this to Dale a while back. This is a short list of the things we discovered between Chase and I about how to run Missing Maps. Chase does most of the Missing Maps. But get people to sign up for OSM in the meantime. Have them bring a mouse, have a bag full of myself, get the red cross to buy them. Make sure you have Wi-Fi, have a back up plan for a task, make sure you have a good task to work on. And then just a bunch of other good ideas. One of the other ones is take short breaks and when you do a short break, teach them a new tool like how to square a building. So here's my challenge to you. I would like you all to go out and create a new Meetup group in your neighborhood. Help get somebody to fund you, get your company to fund you. Get OSM to fund you, and I'm out of time. Add to wiki and add new mappers, schedule Meetup, repeat, do it all over again. And lastly, I'll do some -- do I have time for Q and A? I have time for QA. If you saw the little quotes and stuff on there. They came from Ken, he just wrote a book, and it's on the bottom there. A book of poems he has been writing for years. He's a -- he's a doctor in bird psychology -- bird behavior. I think bird psychology would be probably a better term. So anyway his book's available from Amazon. So questions? >> Thanks. Who pays for the $15? Are you paying for that? >> I'm paying for that. >> Why? Why can't you find someone else to pay for that or ask for collection? >> I want the Meetup. I don't really like having to sit -- submit invoices to get reimbursed. And my wife think so it's cheaper than me going out and drink. So. [Laughter] >> One suggestion to maybe fixing it. So I'm a organizer with Maptime L.A. and we host a lot of OSM parties and one thing we thought to do at one point was have a project, it was a state GIS contest to create a portal that was a map of all of the different GIS departments for cities and counties in California. And so we essentially created, like, an interactive map and entered that into the contest to win money. We were the only money who entered into the contest. And it was good. So we won, so we had a little bit of money to -- >> That's an excellent idea. Thank you. >> I never use Meetup for OpenStreetMap before. Free user, user for free? >> Yes. For free. Free is the only way to do OpenStreetMap. It's -- when we did the group, we had 60 some members, and it dropped to 13? Six. It dropped to six. Yeah. So we're going to -- I'm hoping Meetup listens to us, and I hope they fix their issues. Yeah. >> Go back to -- >> Go back? Oh. I'm -- my head's too big. Chase has told me that before too. Any other questions? Well, thank you, guys, very much. I hope you enjoy the conference. [Applause]