Becoming an (out-of-area) Area Manager

[TimAThing]

Following on from https://www.waze.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=56&p=1027184#p1027184, I must admit I hadn’t thought of applying to do map editing outside of the area I’ve been with Waze. Thought it might be helpful to separate this discussion to help both me and other newer editors.

The instructions and required reading are already documented so I’m not re-asking those questions. But something I haven’t found in the wiki or forums is discussion on what would be considered reasonable for taking on mapping/editing an area outside of your driven area. (Much as I might enjoy driving out somewhere outback and doing some mapping in person, it’s not realistic for me.)

• Should we only take on areas that we have at least some familiarity with from previous visits, or is it ok to take on regions we have little or no experience in but happen to need mapping?

• Aside from the tools accessible within Waze (e.g. street view), what resources are considered acceptable to use as references for mapping? For example, in NSW there is a state-wide source of maps http://maps.six.nsw.gov.au/ that I’ve been using to get definitive suburb boundaries, but is it reasonable to copy street names etc. from a government source (as distinct from Google Maps and online street directories where the copyright is held by a commercial entity)?

• Can anyone offer hints for how to find areas that are undermapped? I tried looking at some regional areas that I’ve visited enough to have some idea about, but they looked like they were mapped reasonably well.

• Associated with the previous question, what are the priorities (and what aren’t)?

• Are there areas that don’t have streets?

• Fixing incorrect city names (I did find a couple of those, but being small areas there’s not a lot of editing work to fix them)?

• Adding significant place areas (parks, schools, water courses) to areas that have street maps only?

• and I’m guessing that adding streets to an under-mapped area is more useful than adding places (schools, parks, etc.) to a street-mapped area. (My goal of reaching L3 is more to do with being able to fix certain problems without posting unlock requests, I don’t have a goal of reaching levels or acquiring points just for the sake of it.)
  Thanks

Tim

[Traveling_Gav]

A better reply later but here is an example near Cessnock and look in Cessnock as well. It looks pretty well done but look closer and you will see missing streets and heaps of missing street names.

https://www.waze.com/editor/?env=row&lon=151.31206&lat=-32.86020&layers=1925&zoom=5&segments=193841081

[ps_au]

Hey Tim.

1 - If you feel confident enough to take on an area you have had little or no experience in but needs mapping, then go for it. I would suggest that editors who have NOT had editing experience and are still getting used to the Australian Style Guide to take on perhaps an area which they may have had some familiarity in the past. This will help them along their path.

2. Always a grey area and one that Ispyisail loves to debate. Techically the official word is that Waze cannot use any other data source without the express permission of the supplier (which is mostly every GIS company in Australia). I personally use Google to find the suburb borders of an area (just type it into maps.google.com.au) and that will help. There are also a lot of Editor Tools at your disposal which may assist in linking Google Maps with the Waze editor.

3. Finding unmapped areas out of the larger townships is a bit tricky and with Australia being so vast it’s a case of a ‘needle in a haystack’ approach. There is still a lot of un-mapped areas, just got to find them. Once you’ve found one, apply for a AM for the area (give yourself more room than you need, and once approved, get mapping!

4. Priorities are to get the streets in WITH names. If a mapped street is in RED, it won’t show on the app.
   Correcting City/Suburb names. Make sure there are no interstate smudges.
   Adding place names to areas - This is easy points.

Hope that helps.

[glomp]

Further to what ps_au has added.

Most editors will want to edit where they live, which is understandable. Most times, this will be in the cities which by now, will be fairly well mapped. Lots of rural areas still need attention.

1: If you are still a bit hesitant about being an out of area AM but would still like to give it a go, you can always ask to be mentored when you are editing there, until you become more comfortable with your editing.

3: Depends upon what state you would like to edit in, there are still areas that have not been looked at for a while or not at all.

Even with areas that look like they are mapped they still have lots of things that can be done to improve the map in that area.

Sometimes they have added new roads or sub divisions. Sometimes roads have never been mapped as they were over looked when they were initally mapping the area.

4: Depending upon the area you manage, priority would be connectivity between towns and with the roads within the towns themselves.

Check that all turns are correctly set and if there are sufficient GPS tracks, that the roads are correctly aligned.

Make sure that the city boundaries are correct, the streets have names and are correctly abbreviated.

Add content such as schools, parks, hospitals etc. Existing places to have the correct details added to them, address, phone number, names, extra services, area boundaries, stop points etc.

Find all the RED roads that other editors have added but have not completed.
(I don’t know why it is so hard to to add a city or name to a road they have just added. Even if you dont know them, just check the “none” checkboxes and complete the edit fully.)

[TimAThing]

@ps_au

2. Always a grey area and one that Ispyisail loves to debate. Techically the official word is that Waze cannot use any other data source without the express permission of the supplier (which is mostly every GIS company in Australia). I personally use Google to find the suburb borders of an area (just type it into maps.google.com.au) and that will help. There are also a lot of Editor Tools at your disposal which may assist in linking Google Maps with the Waze editor.

Hmmm, that gives me an idea. Pops over the the Waze conference thread

3. Finding unmapped areas out of the larger townships is a bit tricky and with Australia being so vast it’s a case of a ‘needle in a haystack’ approach. There is still a lot of un-mapped areas, just got to find them. Once you’ve found one, apply for a AM for the area (give yourself more room than you need, and once approved, get mapping!

I didn’t find any unmapped areas, but did find some undermapped ones and some areas that need fixing, e.g. city/suburb names, unnamed roads. The process of finding chopsticks in the haystack may help me learn how to spot needles.

@glomp

Most editors will want to edit where they live, which is understandable. Most times, this will be in the cities which by now, will be fairly well mapped. Lots of rural areas still need attention.

Well yes, that’s where I started too, and even got the experience of working on smudged and wrong city names with the suburbs next door. But there are only so many opportunities to improve things in Sydney.

1: If you are still a bit hesitant about being an out of area AM but would still like to give it a go, you can always ask to be mentored when you are editing there, until you become more comfortable with your editing.

That’s a good idea - although my reading of the AM pages on the wiki suggested that mentoring was actually the default state. A large part of my uncertainty was to what degree working out-of-area was kosher, although I now see that there are plenty of experienced editors doing that. For the time being I’d concentrate on doing the same things I’ve done locally; mentoring would be useful for the odd question here and there plus once I get to the point of working on things like complex intersections of the sort that are locked at L3+ - I’ll get there eventually but happy to walk before I run.

Thanks to you both - and thanks to Gav for the suggestion about Cessnock. I’ve put in an application for southern coast of NSW - partially because of some familiarity, partially because I did find areas there that needed work, partially because it’s the area I’m most likely to visit in the near future. Will keep Cessnock in mind if I start running out of other areas - or another editor of similar experience to me might like to grab that to build their experience.