Hi Brian, this is cool! And overlaps with some of the work DevSeed has done with OSM Teams (and YouthMappers is actively using)…lets chat more!

Janet,

Thanks for this reflection. Its been great chatting, brainstorming and working with you the past two years that I have been supporting YouthMappers. Congratulations on all of the past accomplishments and looking forward to more in 2022!

Cheers,

Rory

I love me a good acronym. How about: Maps And Geospatial Innovation Centers = MAGICs

A great diary entry Feye, glad we have such capable people supporting YouthMappers!

Hi Pete,

I concur with Russ, thanks for this thoughtful post! It’s nice to see that folks at HOT are not only focused on the software they are developing, but are looking at the impact and interplay it has with the OSM and humanitarian/development communities.

From where I sit, supporting the YouthMappers (YM) program at USAID, I have seen and see that YM and HOT share a lot of common interests and goals. We have worked well together in the past and I believe we will continue to do so in the future.

It is important to remember that both HOT and YM have been wildly successful at helping grow and enrich the OSM community. These efforts have included helping map vulnerable and undermapped areas, expanding and diversifying the community of contributors to OSM, helping train these contributors on a wide range of topics, strengthening local OSM communities, and helping to make connections across communities.

Regardless of the context in which they were prompted, the issues identified highlight tangible areas for improvement that can be addressed by both HOT and the organizations they partner with. At its inception, HOT was purely a disaster response organization. In recent years, HOT has taken on a more diverse set of projects, including longer term initiatives in support of international development and disaster preparedness programs. This expansion into new domains has not always resulted in a corresponding evolution of documentation and processes guideance. Also, establishing where different responsibilities lie between organizations that use the TM and HOT would be helpful in clarifying some of these issues. Similarly, even as a HOT voting member, I have found that HOT’s various roles and services can be a bit confusing since HOT as an organization wears multiple hats, such as being a software service provider, data validation service, community organizer, etc… On any one project it could be playing one or many of these roles and this may be confusing to OSM community members who are not familiar with HOT. As an organization that uses HOT’s TM we would love to explore ways to collaborate and help resolve these issues.

One point that should be clarified is YM’s task creation workflow. While there are five administrators for the YM organization on the TM who are able to create tasks, the tasks are designed and written by local YM chapters. So while it may appear on the TM that there are only five YouthMappers Administrators creating tasks, there is a larger network at play to design, manage, and analyze them.

Your proposal to have links to the OSM wiki makes a lot of sense. This will help tasks in the TM be better aligned with the OEG, provide local contact information, and improve the task’s overall transparency. On the other hand, this opens a new can of worms. The OEG is optional and implemented differently by different organizations and communities. Further, this would link to a system that HOT does not have the authority to enforce and with the plethora of different standards and communications tools used by different OSM communities, might not be standard practice for the organizations that use the TM or in the area being mapped.

Thanks again for the thoughtful diary post and would be happy to discuss and explore solutions to these issues.

To clarify I am not deleting the ones that are slightly misaligned ones…just deleting ones that are very obviously wrong. For example if they are not near roads in any of the available imagery and cut through whole neighborhoods.

Hi I found this diary through a google search…I have come across these roads as well. I noticed that a lot of them don’t align to any of the default imagery (Bing, Digital Globe or ESRI). I will go ahead and delete them or correct them as well!