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andreougm's Diary

Preparing for my first JOSM workshop - Tips/Suggestions?

Posted by andreougm on 25 September 2017 in English.

I am very excited to host a JOSM workshop at the Cornell Branch of the Telluride Association, where I am currently a faculty fellow.This is the first OSM workshop I am running, so I would really appreciate the OSM community’s suggestions.

The plan is (a) to run a 2-hour workshop to familiarise the CBTA community (of ~30 students) with OSM and its editing options and (b) host a mapathon (OSM tasking manager)

The CBTA is a highly diverse, intellectually involved and socially active community of students. I look forward to teaching and learning from them.

Workshop countdown: 56 days :)

Location: Ward 4, City of Ithaca, Tompkins County, New York, 14853, United States

Discussion

Comment from feyeandal on 26 September 2017 at 01:52

From our previous experiences, two-hours is too short for a JOSM workshop. You may consider using Edit with iD instead of teaching JOSM especially if the participants are beginners.

Comment from Glassman on 26 September 2017 at 02:10

  1. To save time have the students preinstall JOSM. Nothing can disrupt the class like a student trying to install Java and JOSM. For those that don’t preinstall, ask them to follow along with another student. They can install JOSM later.
  2. It would really help to have an assistant to walk around helping students that get behind.
  3. Keep to the basics. As @feyeandal said, two hours is short. I’ve covered JOSM in two hours but it doesn’t leave time to work a HOT Task.
  4. Their first challenge should be something local. The imagery should be familiar to them which help first timers.
  5. Once they have been working on a task for a while, stop for a few minutes to introduce new topics, such as keyboard shortcuts.
  6. When you stop in step 5. above, remind them to upload their work.
  7. Make sure they upload before leaving. If they wait until later, it’s likely someone else will have worked on the task resulting in duplicate objects.

Of course when you are done, in keeping with the spirit of OSM, head for a pub to celebrate.

Best of luck, Clifford

Comment from Polyglot on 26 September 2017 at 08:16

Hi Andre,

I created some scripts to automatically set up JOSM preconfigured with some interesting settings for a Mapathon:

https://github.com/osmbe/JOSMforMapathons

This works on Windows and Linux. The precondition is that Java is already installed though. Do the participants bring their own computers?

Jo

Comment from Zverik on 26 September 2017 at 11:16

Installing JOSM is the one thing that often goes wrong. Some computers don’t have recent Java, some have trouble with displaying fonts, etc etc.

Also, ask everyone to bring a mouse: mapping with a touchpad is painful. Mac users don’t usually think of that.

Comment from Zverik on 26 September 2017 at 11:17

Also, you can skip teaching tags if you teach people just a single shortcut: F3 (Fn+F3 on macbooks).

Comment from andreougm on 27 September 2017 at 13:10

Thank you all for the suggestions. I’ve asked the students to download JOSM in advance, but it seems like a good idea to have a pre-session and make sure that JOSM works for everyone.

Have a nice day

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