New OSM Contributor Feed
by Pascal Neis - Published: July 1st, 2012
The OpenStreetMap project keeps attracting more and more new members that register and start contributing their data to the project. In one of my last blog posts I presented a website which shows the location of each new and active member based on one of their first edits. Since the launch of this website, some of you asked me about a potential opportunity to feed this information for a particular area. Well, there you go!
You can create your own bbox of interest to determine the area in which you would like to be informed about new members. All you need is the center coordinates (lon & lat) of your area. The following URL is an example for Berlin (Germany):
http:// resultmaps.neis-one.org/newestosmfeed.php?lon=13.3&lat=52.5°=1
The “deg” parameter is used to specify the length (degrees) of your bbox. This means that with a “deg” value of 1, a distance of about 111km in each direction from your center point will be determined to create the bbox. This value of 1 degree also represents the maximum distance possible. The resulting Atom feed contains all new members of the past 7 days that made at least one change in you predefined area [1]. Some additional information about each new member was added too [2]. The database will be updated every morning between 6 and 7am CET.
*Update*
On the following webpage you can create your own personal osm feed in a few simple steps: http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/newestosmcreatefeed.php
Enjoy!
thx @ maɪˈæmɪ Dennis
Again a really nice tool from Neis-one. This is really helpful for spotting new users, welcome them, and check if they maybe deleted a lot of stuff in their first edit not being aware that this was already live 😉
cheers,
Martin
Thank you!
Thank you, it’s useful!
Other features coul be a map on which we could draw a box or a point to create the feed, so it would not be necessary to look for coordinates and width in degrees. Like http://openlayers.org/dev/examples/draw-feature.html
And another map to show which areas are controlled and whcich are not, http://openlayers.org/dev/examples/boxes.html.
Thank you too. Some new features will come at the weekend 🙂
done! 🙂
See http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/newestosmcreatefeed.php
I’ve just seen the new features from http://opengeodata.org/weekly-osm-summary-48 and I have thought “This is exactly what I was looking for!” but I forgot that I suggested those features here 😀 Thank you!
Hehe 🙂
You are welcome …
that’s a really cool tool. but is it possible to specify a bbox (ideally, a shape 😉 ) ?
centre + rectangle/deg doesn’t allow me to create one feed for latvia ( http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/newestosmcreatefeed.php?zoom=7&lat=57.34762&lon=24.53443&layers=B0 ), so i’d probably have to create 4 feeds to cover it…
Hi Richlv, there u go:
http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/newestosmcountry.php?c=Latvia
All the Best,
Pascal
This link should now read:
http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/newestosmcountryfeed.php?c=Latvia
I couldn’t find this link anywhere on your blog, nor a way to select a country with a user interface.
And now for a little feature request 🙂
How about allowing a feed based on an arbitrary admin area? (I know, probably not quite straightforward)
Hi Joost,
thank you for your comment. The correct link should be: http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/newestosm?c=Latvia
The page is already mentioned at my resultmaps-overview (http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/) @ “Where are the new OSM Contributors?”
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[…] The new RSS feed, created by Pascal, informs you about new Mappers in your area. You can check it out here. […]
Seems like a handy RSS feed. I’m going to try using this to send welcome messages to new users as they pop-up in London.
Do you share the code for this anywhere? I was noticing the feed content says “First aktiv in”. That should be spelt “Active”.
Hi,
Very handy indeed !
I use it to get in touch with the new contributors in my areas of interest, to discuss about first modifications and propose some help, if required.
Maybe it could be further improved to be informed:
_ only when a new contributor reaches x changesets (e.g. 5)
_ after n weeks for contributors with less than x changesets
For the first case, it allows to have a quick overview of the contributor’s interests and way of contribution, but also gives some time to get along with the various contribution tools.
It is later on easier to contact the contributor with a personnal message, and allows to focus on the most motivated ones, where the chance for establishing a dialog is higher.
For the second case, purpose would be to send a short reminder, ask for some feedback on the OSM project, and ultimately to correct data that will probably not be adjusted shortly if the contributor is not active anymore
Hi Fabien, thank you very much for your comment and your feedback. Overall I think it is not easy to integrate your second idea into that tool because I haven’t this information about how many changesets a new user have. IMHO I will just be informed if a new user starts next to me and it doesn’t matter if the new user has one or ten changesets. Do you know what I mean?
Utterly awesome service. Many thanks for this.
Been thinking about an email notification service using this. Does this sound sensible?
Hi Tim, thank you very much for your comment. I think this is what you are searching for:
https://ifttt.com/recipes/52519
https://ifttt.com/recipes/52472
I created a recipe to add a row to a Google Spreadsheat. Makes it easier for shared data management I think.
https://ifttt.com/recipes/151526-add-new-osm-users-to-a-spreadsheat
More info on my plans with it here: http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/joost%20schouppe/diary/21153
I made it with a country feed, as this is still manageable in a small country like Belgium. As we have different languages, it would be nice if you could pick an administrative area of the highest level to build the feed. But I can imagine that being slightly complicated to build. (and I can just check manually what language they probably speak)
[…] The new RSS feed, created by Pascal, informs you about new Mappers in your area. You can check it out here. […]