So, about six months after promising Ben Abelshausen, I’m finaly organizing a MeetUp in Antwerpen.

As I know organizing isn’t quite my forte, I’ve been thinking a lot about what other thing one can do to make OSM more social today. As opposed to “how could we make it more social if we were programmers with all the time in the world”. So, there was one piece of very low hanging fruit we identified on the last “monthly” “summer” meetup in Gent . We could just let all the new contributors in our area know that OSM are people. So when you join, you wouldn’t think OSM is somewhere you just dump some data, but a place where people actually meet and collaborate on a common dream. (in case you wondered: yes, nerds can be romantic)

So I made a Google Spreadsheet where all new Belgian contributors are listed quite clean. You can click a link to their profile and send them a welcome message. After you sent it, you just add some info to the spreadsheet, so the same new user wouldn’t be getting more than one welcome message. I made a draft standard welcome message (in Dutch) anyone can use or modify of completely throw away and make something better.

The welcome letter is available on a Google doc. The spreadsheet is available as a read only here. ## I don’t want to be doing this alone. I would like to share both Google Documents with anyone who wants to help out. All you need is a Google Account. We’ll obviously need a French translation. And I would like there to be different letters of introduction. ##

If you’re interested, I used (of course) one of neis-one’s services. This RSS is read by an IFTTT recipe into Google Docs. It’s read a bit messy, so I introduced a second worksheet that cleans it up a bit with some basic formulas.