Hi, everyone,
Between the end of April and mid-May, my former TomTom colleagues * and I posted a communications survey with the goal of gathering some information about how OSM users experience OSM community communications. Now that the survey is complete, I want to give it context as part of our presentation at State of the Map US in Richmond, Virginia.
At SotM US, we will be presenting on How to Use Data for Effective Community Communication. (The project is supported by TomTom and informed by work that two of us have done for the CWG, but it’s not formally a TomTom or OSMF project.) Our primary source of data for this presentation is derived from a tool that scrapes publicly available, anonymized, channel data from OSM listservs and forums. To augment this data, we created a communications survey. We knew that we would not be able to get a broadly representative cross-section of the OSM user demographic with our limited time and resources, but we did believe we would get some additional details that could help inform our approach.
The survey had a mix of free answer and multiple choice questions about demographics, local community involvement, and experiences using the various forums, lists and other channels. We created 12 versions of the same survey to post in 12 different channel types so that we could get a sense of the user demographics per channel: community forum, mailing list, Telegram, Twitter, Discord, Slack, Mastodon, Reddit, IRC/Matrix, weekly OSM, Facebook, LinkedIn. We received 464 responses, with more responses from Europe and North America than from Latin America, Asia and Africa. We will present a few of the observable trends at our presentation, with the caveat that they are more impressionistic than representative.
Then, we will present the channel data, which is a much larger set. We will also include details on our method and processes. Finally, we’ll give attendees the chance to work with the data themselves. Some of the preliminary questions that I, as a communications professional (not as a member of the CWG), think would be interesting to consider include:
- When is important to use English and when is it important to use a local language?
- How could the channel usage data be used to help improve OSM collaboration on local projects and global projects?
- How could studying channel usage trends help new users to onboard to OSM?
- Does the data suggest the possibility of one or two channels that could be considered “primary” or “official”? What would a data-backed approach to such an analysis look like?
- What can’t we learn from the data? For example, it is not easy to measure “impressions” i.e. people who are reading, not posting.
Of course, the community can and should look at the survey data and the channel data and form their own questions! This is just the beginning of a long inquiry.
What’s next? We will present at SotM US on Friday, 9 Jun 2023, EDT-16:30/UTC-04:00.
Best,
Courtney Williamson, person, OSMF Communication Working Group, and fundraising volunteer
* Marjan Van de Kauter: MarjanVan,(TomTom community engager, and OSMF Communication Working Group member)
Keara Dennehy (TomTom business analyst)
L.J. Lambert (TomTom business analyst)