Welcome Ndeyi!

Hi Amna, thanks for sharing your experience! Really nice read… Be great to share your diary with the HOT community directly. Are you on the HOT mailing list or slack?

https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/hot https://slack.hotosm.org/

Well said

Love watching the OSM Bangladesh community go from strength to strength! More to come in 2017, I don’t doubt ;)

Hi Martin, really interesting! I have a question / comment.

During OSM Geo Week, many new mappers participated (a quick glance says more than 4,000). However, unlike other major new mapper activations such as a natural disaster, the vast majority made their first edits at a mapathon. Does this ‘recruitment’ mean longer / more substantial engagement in the medium to long term?

Another question, although maybe not so specific to your research… I have done A LOT of validating on tasks done over this week. Does the quality of the mapped data improve compared to that contributed by mappers who would normally start at home (without the support of people at an event)?

Thanks for sharing!

Pete

Absolutely! However, we still get new mappers who map weird and wonderful shapes for buildings that are essentially rectangles… However, new mappers using JOSM, which has the building tool (automatically plots your buildings with right angles) tend not to make that mistake.

Kudos! I’m a big fan….

@Simon

I Just wanted to add to what Martin (MarTintamarre) said. The discussion that has been prompted by this post - and other things - is extremely valuable. I think Martin and CartONG are probably the best out of all of us of promoting that link to local OSM contributions and community through their Missing Maps work. Your comments led to a discussion amongst the various Missing Maps members and I think we pretty much unanimously agree that we could and should do more to achieve the kind of cross-pollination Harry refers to in his slides (which, by the way, he presented at a Missing Maps event).

I guess the conversation I would personally like to have now is how do we best do this? @imagico made a good point in a previous comment:

“IMO realizing that while there certainly are common interests there are also always significant differences in goals is the key to a successful cooperation.”

How do we best try and bring mappers who have entered the OSM ecosystem via Missing Maps to the local communities’ tables?

Interested to hear what people think…..

Hi @SimonPoole & @woodpeck,

I work for MSF and lead on matters relating to the Missing Maps project.

From a purely MSF perspective, OpenStreetMap has become a hugely impactful tool in an NGO that saves lives and alleviates suffering in some of the worst places in the world. OSM map data has been used for operational decision making and medical interventions in Central African Republic, South Sudan, DRC, Bangladesh and Chad so far, to name but a few. I apologise for leading with the “vulnerable people bit”, but I am at a bit of a loss to understand what is left of Missing Maps when you remove that element.

I hope that the fact that OSM makes this work possible is something to celebrate. What the OSM community has built is having a positive impact on the lives of many and it is testament to the way it has been built and maintained…

We work with remote mappers and local mappers, through the tasking manager and in person, whose motivation is to help MSF reach vulnerable people. The reward is implicit in the volunteering they do. They do not start to participate in Missing Maps because there is the opportunity is there to earn a badge for building mapping.

We try to implement tools and processes to help those mappers become good at what they are doing, to keep the OSM database quality as high as possible. This includes developing validators, producing tracing guides, training people in field data collection, producing online training materials, feeding back on how contributions are used in the field (and on how they could be better used), improving OSM editors, and yes, giving people badges when they have mapped X buildings.

You are correct that Missing Maps is not an organisation - it is a project. There is no bank account and, therefore, no pro-forma accounts. Missing Maps is a collection of organisations who think that using and contributing to OSM is a good way to make the work we do in the field more effective.

The remote and local mappers contribute data that enriches OSM in areas where organic community growth is slow or non-existent. Yes, they are encouraged to map the features that MSF needs, but what MSF needs is simply base map data. We need roads, residential areas, admin divisions, health centres, schools, water points etc etc. I do not quite understand where the inferred conflict of interest lies….

I work for MSF and am part of the Missing Maps project and I regularly map with (and, am taught by) long term members of the OSM community. They have guided us in developing the project and are the people that teach our new mappers.

MSF puts up funds for Missing Maps, too. We buy mappers pizza occasionally, we train people in the countries where we work in good data collection techniques, we provide small bits of tech where it’s hard to come by. The suggestion that any of this money is spent as part of some sort of OSM power grab would be laughed out of the office. The only reason that money is spent from MSF budgets on any OSM-related work is because a strong OSM is good for MSF field teams…

I understand that there is some bad feeling here, but I don’t really understand where it comes from. I am, however, open to the conversation if people are interested in making it constructive…

Just to address Richard’s points quickly (and anecdotally)….

From what I have seen at the London mapathons, it’s not just GIS pros who take to JOSM quicker. It seems that people who deal with any / many types of software professionally (I guess the ‘techier’ end of the mapping party attendee spectrum) get frustrated with iD quickly and take to JOSM very easily.

On the trainers, I can say that as the Missing Maps / HOT London community is quite mature, we actually usually have people who learnt to map using iD at mapathons as the iD trainers. It’s rare that our JOSM experts do this - they more often put their efforts into helping JOSM learners / training validators. This means the iD training is usually quite appropriate for the newbie audience.

Great post @Martin!

Nice idea!

Nice work!

Hi all, Benni has added this to github now: https://github.com/Hagellach37/pybossa_missingmaps

Cheers,

Pete

Thanks Dave, the guy that coded it has reached the limit of his skills, so he’s looking for someone who can help him with the bugs!

By the way, if you double click, you can pan / zoom…

P

Thanks for the feedback, Dave!

Super interesting, Jorieke.

Some thoughts…

When people prefer to stay off the map, for fear of eviction for example… Do they know in what ways a map would be beneficial? What if there is repeated cholera outbreaks in that slum? What if there is a high risk of fire? How well can/do NGOs explain the positive impact that mapping might have? Should organisations in this case just map privately for these purposes and keep the data closed?

On the excellent table you have made, for me there is a column missing… This one says ‘Local OSM community in collaboration with a global, remote community’. If these two can work in tandem, with each group playing to their strengths and feeding back to one another, they would surely be greater than the sum of their parts. And, I mean this not just at the time of a major emergency but as something sustained. With Missing Maps, we are starting to seed some collaborations like this at the moment and it is a very interesting process! Nothing to report yet, but hopefully not too long…..

Great piece ;)

Whoooah! How did you find that so fast, Russ??

Great post, but I should say that credit for the Haiti drone / camera work goes to the red Cross, not MSF!

Mapillary sequences would be amazing. We have done a low tech version of this, where we scour for images of the place to be traced and then link a pinterest board from the task, so mappers can get some sense of how imagery and what the ploace actually looks like link up.

If you need any support with the Missing Maps stuff, give us a shout…!

Pete