Adding a new privileges status for experienced mappers

[severinmenard]

would be the first privileges status. No project management but the capacity to access to the validate /unvalidate process. People without those privileges (beginners) would not be able to access this process, focusing on completing tasks and able to mark tasks as done or undone

[ethan-nelson]

I've been wrestling with this the past few days. I think there should indeed be some sort of 'level' necessary to open up the validation...some people might not understand what it is and click it validated to really mark their work ''done''. At the same time, we don't want to become elitist or exclusive, in spite of the extra importance of validation.

My last pull request (#581) retrieves the number of changesets submitted to OSM for a user. Perhaps, we should do a combination of: a threshold of changeset submissions and some metric of previous TM experience to open up validation. Unfortunately, users may be very good validators but have never marked a tile done, so we cannot use the tile completion number directly. Another issue is how often we would poll these metrics to change their authority, as people do improve and build up their stats over time.

An alternative could be a permission assigned by admins, but that has the hurdle of requiring someone to contact an admin and that admin delegating the permissions to them.

Finally, we could have some sort of page that would have some brief set of questions...not a graded exam, but a few scenes asking users to identify if example tiles should be validated or not. If successful, the system would automatically assign the validator status to that user. Sure, people could cheat or find a way to 'beat' the system, but I think this is more about at least putting up some extra layer a user has to go through so they are somewhat conscious of what validating really means.

[pgiraud]

I agree that there should be a privilege for "validators".
Given the following facts:

• it seems difficult to determinate the level of experience of a user (duration and quality of participation in OSM),
• activators (project managers) usually know who the more experienced mappers are.

I think that we could start with validators being designated by the project managers for each project.
I'll prepare a document to explain that in details.

[russdeffner]

@pgiraud I'm not sure how it would work, but we are developing a 'badge' for completing the 'validation role' training (part of the Activation Curriculum) - maybe there is a way to optionally only allow validation from those who have obtained the badge. Email me, etc. and we can discuss, might be an option for further 'restricting/vetting' those who can validate.

[pgiraud]

Hey! Good to know.
What do you mean by "developing" exactly?

[russdeffner]

In the near future there will be a course here: http://moodle.dev.hotosm.org/ for validators, still working on details for badging system.

[harry-wood]

A "privilege" level might be a good idea, but at least as a first milestone here's a simpler idea:

Everyone should be able to "activate" the validator features for themselves. Maybe a button over in the settings page "Become a validator". I think that would eliminate the problem of new users accidentally using validator features.

[bgirardot]

If there is a user permissions system for validation and/or 'advanced' mapping projects, we should make sure project managers have the option to 'opt out' a project from those restrictions.