Humanitarian Openstreetmap Team (HOT) is an international team focused on humanitarian action and community development through open mapping. Since 2010, the organization has managed activations to attend multiple events such as understanding hazards, public health, refugee response, among others. However, when we think about organizing large-scale efforts it can be complex, due to the necessary logistics, volunteers involved, and also assuring that the data collected is meaningful. MapCampaigner, is a tool which monitors progress, view metrics on the quality and completeness of collected data and users engaged. The goal of this talk is to present the latest features included in the latest update of the tool, the goals that MapCampaigner accomplishes and many humanitarian and non-humanitarian examples through a demo.
When we talk about a mapping campaign, it generally has specific characteristics:
Desire to collect geospatial data for a purpose.
Define an area of interest.
Define a set of features and attributes to collect.
The period of time of the campaign
Group of people to collect the data. Could be highly trained staff members or volunteers.
It would sound simple. However, it is possible to find challenges in difficult places. For instance, how to crowdsource precise locations and specific attributes of every school in Barranquilla, Colombia? Because some locations are inaccessible, it becomes difficult and costly to deploy people to the area to collect and validate the data. Many tools have been developed to address these challenges remotely, like OpenMapKit and Maps.me to collect data and do some quality assurance with JOSM, for instance. Despite this, these tools do not have the property to monitor specific features/attributes, define current status of the mapping campaign, or validate people contributing in an area.
Putting these challenges in mind, HOT designed the MapCampaigner tool. Users can track and measure the quality of many features such as schools, buildings and cafes at the same time. This mapping campaign will report users involved, missing tags, and percentage of completeness in an area for each attribute collected. Also, MapCampaigner has integrations with apps such as Maps.me and OpenMapKit
In this talk, I will walk through the tool, how it is used, and seek input for enhancements. Will show new features included in the latest user-centered redesign using live demo. The schedule of this talk is the following:
Introduction and problem statement (5 minutes).
MapCampaigner features (5 minutes)
Examples and demo (5 minutes)
Conclusions and future work (5 minutes)