Some time ago I saw a diagram on the OpenStreetMaps statistics pages which showed the contribution of OSM Data by contributor in percent (here). This diagram was created last year (2009).

I tried to repeat this interesting analysis with the latest OSM data to see if there have been any significant changes. The following diagrams show the results of this analysis using the mid-august OSM data. The last modifier of an object is being considered as owner. (I think it has been handled the same way in the diagram of 2009?)

Contribution of Nodes

Contribution of Ways

Contribution of Relations

The results are more or less identical to the ones from last year. 98% of the OSM data are distributed on almost 10000 contributors in 2009 and 12000 contributors in 2010.

Based on my “How did you contribute to OpenStreetMap ?” and the used full planet dump (08/01/2010) I tried to create the same diagrams but based on the contributor who created the objects (version=”1”). The results are as followed:

Contribution of Nodes

Contribution of Ways

Contribution of Relations

I personally expected that the diagrams would change based on the questions “Who created the object?” and “Who worked on the object the last?”, but one needs to take a very close look to determine the differences within the stats. This means that more or less just about 12000 members have been working on the DB and contributed most of the data … what do you think?

thx @ dennis

Since last week there is a website available, which is able to display how you contributed to the OpenStreetMap (OSM) project: http://hdyc.neis-one.org

Today, I made some small updates. The picture below shows the changes in the website. First (1) I imported the new planet data (Planet Dump 09/15/2010) that shows you on which OSM objects you are the most recent modifier. *NEW* is that the timestamp of your first contribution to OSM is displayed (see (2)!), further a link to your first OSM Node is attached (3).

How did you contribute to OpenStreetMap ?

So: “How did you contribute to OpenStreetMap?” Use your UserLink and share it with other OSM members (3) … 🙂

Last week I was able to present a variety of statistics that showed the amount of OpenStreetMap (OSM) members of the database compared with the numbers of  the actual amount of registered members.  However, I was just able to consider the most recent dataset (Planet Dump 08/19/2009) and could not take the history of the different objects into account. The results of this first analysis showed that last changes in the OSM database have been made by a total of 98.000 members.

In one of the comments to this post, Apmon mentioned that he had conducted a pretty similar analysis in the past but he had used the changeset file. In his case the results showed about 130.000 members that had contributed to OSM.

For a couple of months now there is a, for now still experimental, full planet dump file available, which also considers the history of the OSM objects. I repeated my analysis from last week with this dump file and counted all the members that ever created a node, a way and/or relation or modified any of them. The results showed about 112.000 OSM members.

I was still surprised by the differences between the results of my analysis and the one conducted by Apmon. So I took a closer look at the changeset-file. Using the most recent changeset-file (08/25/2010) I received a pretty similar amount of almost 132.000 members that assumedly made changes in OSM. However, the results show that there is a noticeable difference between the changeset-file and the planet-file. But where does this difference come from? Could there be changesets that have been recorded although nothing has ever been changed in the OSM database? Apparently the answer is “yes”! The number of members in the changeset file that caused a changeset but never included any actual changes is around 16.000. I asked Frederik how this could be possible. He and Matt explained that as soon as a member signs in with Potlach a changeset is created automatically for this user. This means that 16.000 members signed in with Potlach but never made any changes in the database? Very interesting number, isn’t it? Did the “new” members only take a look at the editor or were they overstrained?

By Damien Cox

There was another comment to the last post by Harry, who suggested, to send an email to all OSM members, for example afterfinishing Potlach 2. This way the “non-active” members might get active and interested in the project again. I think this is a great idea! Although there are a few things that need to be considered before doing this, as Harry mentions in his comment …

… and again: thx @ dennis !

There has been an exciting question on the German OSM mailing list yesterday (here). To clarify this question a little to the readers of this blog, the OSM member basically asked if anybody knows how many users ever really worked on a single note in OSM at all, and how many so called “nominal members” (members that never touched any node in OSM) can be found in OSM?

It sounded interesting to me, so I started working on a way to figure out the numbers. My results showed that the entire OSM planet file (dated 08/18/2010) has about 735 million nodes that have been provided by about 93.000 OSM members. 60 million ways were mapped by 68.000 members and about 10.000 members were involved with the creation of almost 690.000 relations. The history of the objects could not be considered during the analysis! In total there were about 98.000 members that contributed to the OSM database.

However, these numbers still show an interesting result considering the actual amount of 290.000 registered OSM members. So the question remains if there are a lot of members in OSM who are still standing in the waiting line and will start with their first edits pretty soon?

To see what the numbers looked like one year ago, I changed the tool that I created one more time and repeated the analysis with the planet file of 08/19/2009. I received the following results: At the given time there were about 412 million nodes provided by 49.000 members in the database. 32 million ways were mapped by 41.000 members and about 6.000 members were involved with the creation of almost 180.000 relations.

This means that one year ago all OSM data has been provided by 51.000 members although there were about 145.000 members registered. Thus, in the year 2009 about 35% of registered members did at least one edit on the OSM database. This number does not really change with the latest OSM dataset, with 290.000 registered members and about 98.000 members with at least one edit which represent about 34%!

To give a better overview, here are even more numbers for the year 2008: 253 million nodes provided by 15.000 members. 20 million ways mapped by almost 14.000 members and about 16.000 relations created by 1.600 members. In total there were about 16.000 members that contributed to the OSM database, while there were about 55.000 members registered. Thus, the percentage of active registered members lies around 29%.

In general the remaining question is: What happened to the other 65% that registered for the project but did not contribute to it? Is it too hard or too complicated to contribute to the project? Did those members just collect data for a short period of time? Is that why they do not show up in the analysis shown above?

thx @ Dennis for helping me with the translation!

In the last post “current” OSM user activities per day, week and month were shown. The table providing the information of Users per Country was limited to the “TOP 16” and just a short timeframe. The following world map shows the amount of users per country for one month i.e. 10.05-10.06.2010

However, since this first map just gives some general information about the total amount of users per country and does not consider the population in each country, we made a second map that shows the relation between active users and the population in each country. To develop this map a so called “OSM-User-Ratio” has been created which includes the amount of OSM users per 1 million citizens for each country.

Next to the amount of users also the total amount of new nodes for each country were analyzed and can be seen in the following world map. The total amount of notes does not consider modified or deleted nodes.

So called “Bots” which are able to do certain automatic tagging-changing-actions have not been considered in the world map including the total amount of new nodes. Future analysis should consider these automatically created changes to show the differences between the maps including the nodes with and without the use of bots. Furthermore it would be interesting to see how many nodes in average are being created by one user a day, a week or a month … further suggestions or ideas?

thx @ dennis z. for the maps!

Im letzten Post habe ich verschiedene “Statistiken” bzgl. der Nutzeraktivität von OSM in Deutschland gezeigt. Manche empfanden das diese “nichts aussagen” oder das “es ja klar ist, das größere oder bevölkerungsstärkere Länder automatisch mehr Edits haben”. Letzteres war zwar im Vorfeld denkbar, wirklich bewiesen hat es aber niemand, oder? Mir ging es eigentlich nicht darum zu zeigen, dass in den größeren Bundesländern in DE mehr los ist, sondern ich wollte vielmehr einmal Zahlen herausfiltern, um damit darzustellen, wie viele Leute denn in jedem Bundesland aktiv an der Karte arbeiten. Ok, etwas “Kritik” könnte man vielleicht am Zeitraum der Analyse (1 Woche) ausüben, es war ein Feiertag dazwischen, aber macht dies wirklich etwas aus? Waren also evtl. an einem Tag mal 50 User mehr oder weniger als einem anderen Tag aktiv? Macht sich das bei einem Mittelwert über eine Woche überhaupt bemerkbar? Da es sich, wie bereits erwähnt, vielmehr um eine “aktuelle” Angabe der aktiven User handelt, denke ich, ist dies hier mal vernachlässigbar. Vielleicht wird OSM.org kommende Woche wieder „geheist“ und dann sehen die Stats bzgl. der User wieder anders aus.

Kommen wir nun zur eigentlichen Frage: Sind weltweit nur 1% der bei OSM registrierten Usern aktiv? Als erstes sollte man unterscheiden, was “aktiv” bedeuten könnte. Ist es auf eine tägliche, wöchentliche oder gar monatliche “Aktivität” des Nutzers bezogen? Da das Tool zum Auswerten des Changefiles vorhanden war, habe ich die Analyse noch einmal für andere Zeiträume durchlaufen lassen. Das folgende Diagramm visualisiert die User-Aktivitäten der “Top 16” Länder für den Zeitraum vom 03.06.-10.06.10 (1 Woche). Die User-Anzahlen wurden jeweils über den Mittelwert der User, die mind. einen Edit im Land pro Tag ausgeführt haben, berechnet. Um in die Liste der “Top 16” aufgenommen zu werden, mussten in dem jeweiligen Land mindestens 20+ User an der Karte gearbeitet haben. Alle anderen Länder, die nicht in den “Top 16” enthalten sind, werden unter „Sonstiges“ gezählt.

Ok, jetzt werden wieder manche sagen “das sagt nichts aus!”. Naja, ich sehe das etwas anders. Hätte man nicht eigentlich erwarten müssen/sollen, dass in den USA um einiges mehr “aktive” User sind? Da wohnen doch so viele … 😉 Woran liegt es, dass es in den USA nicht so gut läuft? Wie bereits im letzen Post erwähnt, ist im Diagramm sehr gut zu erkennen, dass momentan in Deutschland durch die hohe Useranzahl am aktivsten an der Karte gearbeitet wird. Ferner ist ebenfalls ersichtlich das in Frankreich, in Russland und auch in UK jeweils mit knapp über oder unter 100 Usern an der Karte Änderungen erfolgen. Die folgenden Tabellen enthalten jeweils die Anzahl der aktiven User in OSM für weitere Zeiträume:

Nimmt man den ersten Mittelwert, die Anzahl der User für einen Tag, würde man bei ca. 1.710 aktiven Usern und einer Anzahl von derzeit grob 260.000 registrierten User über einen Anteil von noch nicht einmal 1% sprechen. Da aber nicht jeder Nutzer täglich aktiv ist, ist dieser Wert sicherlich nicht aussagekräftig. Daher wurde noch einmal die Useranzahl für eine Woche ermittelt, die jeweils mindestens einen Edit innerhalb einer Woche ausgeführt haben. Weltweit kommt dann eine Anzahl von ca. 5.700 zusammen. Dies würde wiederum einem Anteil von ca. 2% entsprechen. Abschließend wurde noch die Useranzahl ermittelt, die jeweils mindestens einen Edit innerhalb eines Monats gemacht haben. Dabei kommt man auf eine Useranzahl von ca. 13.300, was wiederum einem Anteil von ca. 5% entspricht. Dies wäre zumindest der aktive Useranteil, den man des Öfteren auf verschiedenen Konferenzen hört oder im Web liest … Aber trotzdem insgesamt eine nicht so hohe Beteiligung der „Community“ wie man es auf Grund der registrierten User vermuten lassen könnte, oder?

Angeregt durch den vorletzten Post über die „zunehmende“ Anzahl der Fehler in OpenStreetMap DE stellte sich mir die Frage: In welchem Bundesland wird derzeit am meisten an der Map gearbeitet? Aus den daily-Planet-Changefiles für den Zeitraum vom 3.6. bis zum 10.06.2010 (1 Woche) habe ich mal die mittlere Anzahl der Node Edits pro Tag für jedes Bundesland in Deutschland ausgewertet (Edits an Ways sind in diesen Diagrammen (noch) nicht enthalten).

Im Diagramm fallen die drei „großen“ Bundesländer auf. Nordrhein-Westfahlen ist ebenfalls wieder im vorderen Feld der Statistik dabei. Diesmal aber im positiven Sinne 😉 . Bei der Statistik zum Routing View Analyse war es genau andersherum, dort war es das Bundsland mit den meisten Fehlern im Landesvergleich, (vgl. Statistik). Also somit ist NRW das wohl derzeit aktivste Bundesland in OSM DE, aber auch das mit den meisten Fehlern?!

In den Mailinglisten oder auch in den Foren liest man immer wieder eine etwas unterschiedliche Zahle wie groß denn die Beteiligung der deutschen Mapper an der OSM Karte ist. Im folgenden Diagramm sind die Anzahlen der Mapper pro Bundesland für DE für den oben angegeben Zeitraum, die dort einen oder mehrere Edits ausgeführt haben, zu sehen.

Werden die weltweiten OSM Mapper gezählt, so kommt man beim oben genannten Zeitraum von einer Woche auf eine tägliche Durchschnittszahl von ca. 1.710 die jeweils eine oder mehrere Edits an der Map vollbringen. Bei einem Mittelwert in DE von ca. 580 “Mappern” (Usern die in Deutschland an der Map gearbeitet haben) wären dies ca. 34% ! Dies würde bedeuten, dass derzeit ca. 1/3 der weltweiten OSM-Mapper in Deutschland an der Karte arbeiten. Gut für Deutschland, „schlecht“ für die restliche weltweite OSM Karte?

Eine Xls-Tabelle mit den Node Changes pro Tag für Deutschland kann hier heruntergeladen werden.