Introduction

This plugin makes it possible for volunteer JOSM users to track their editing time and have a work report created in the ​community economic system Rovas, at the moment of uploading a job into the OSM database.

Benefits

direct

• track time spent editing in JOSM
• make a permanent record of the labor time for each changeset in the form of a Rovas work report
• earn a (convertible) community currency Chron for the JOSM work

indirect

• in order to record the labor time and earn Chrons, the plugin-created work report must be verified. To do so, Rovas picks two users and sends them an email invitation to do so. The email contains link to a web site, where they can see the changes made in the changeset and optionally also confirm, or reject the reported labor time. At the same time they can also check quality of the edits the verified user made with JOSM. Consequently, the plugin use has potential to improve the OSM database data quality.
• having a reliable and verified record of time spent by the OSM mappers can benefit funding of the whole OSM ecosystem. For example, the total labor time, tallied from the individual work reports as shown on the ​Openstreetmap project page in Rovas can be used to provide potential sponsors with verified data about mapping effort exerted by volunteer mappers. It can also serve as an instrument to incentivize commercial consumers of the OSM data to reciprocate and reward the OSM community with much needed funds to improve the server infrastructure or financially support mapping efforts across the globe.

Installation and configuration

1. To use the plugin, you must have an account in Rovas. Conveniently, Rovas provides an option to register with one of several OpenID identity providers, including Openstreetmap.
2. Next, in the Plugins screen of the JOSM preferences, select the Rovas Connector plugin and activate it.
3. From the Rovas API pane of your Rovas profile, copy the API key and API token into the similarly named fields in the Rovas Connector plugin configuration page. Click a checkbox to confirm that you are not paid by a firm for your JOSM work. The Timer tolerance setting in the plugin preferences determines the length of idle time between user actions that is counted as active. Other settings can be left with their default values.

Using the plugin

The plugin timer is initiated at the moment JOSM is started. The counter (elapsed time) is updated every time a layer is added, or a change is made (a node is moved, added or deleted...). The plugin-provided info block shows the elapsed time. The value can be reset to 0 or an arbitrary time by clicking the Reset timer button.

After edits are sent to OSM a dialog box