Building the community in South Florida – Transcription

Okay, next, we have Levente talking about building in the community in South Florida. Thank you. Thanks, everyone, for coming. I’m glad I’m at U.S. oh. Sorry about that. All right. So thanks again. I’m Levente, I’m with Maptime Miami. Where I became a coorganizer. And I’m also getting a Ph.D. at the University of Florida. And this talk is going to be about how we are trying to build the geospatial community in Miami. So just a quick outline. We have decided to do a building import in Miami Dade County. Very similar to the L.A. county boards and also the New York City boards. But it’s a different scale. We don’t have many mappers in Miami and we don’t have enough buildings because the country just doesn’t provide it. So we have tried different outreach techniques like contacting local mappers. Which I thought were local. Also, we did our regular Maptime meetups. And since I was being at the University of Florida, I also introduced in import task as part of coursework. So I would like to show you whether it’s worked or not, basically. Just a few words about the import. I’m not going to be too technical because this is not the purpose of this talk. We have decided to go with the hybrid approach. Meaning that we have separated our building data set into two parts. And one the major part of the buildings were uploaded automatically with upload scripts. But we also wanted to engage the community. So we have introduced many tasks as well where people have to review these buildings and decide whether they want to upload them or not. These buildings that needed to be manually reviewed have had some kind of conflict. But nothing major. On the left side of the figure you see a south intersection that cannot be uploaded to OpenStreetMap. Sometimes buildings in our maps were overlapping with existing buildings. So we also need some humans to take care of that issue as well. And also the same buildings overlapping with the road network. We went through the regular channels of data import. So we introduced it in the mailing list. Then we had some meetups just to, as a community, know that we are planning to do this. We have set up our own tasking manager instance. Also have the Wiki page and the tutorial that’s hosted on GitHub. So we believe we had all the resources and we could hand it over to people. The data of this import is almost 100,000 buildings. And after the people assessing steps, we ended up having 84,000 buildings in the automatic bucket that was uploaded with the upload streets. And that left us almost 11,000 buildings for the actual mappers to review. This image shows basically spatial distribution of these imports. This is Miami Dade County. And you can see the buildings in the import data set with the reddish colors, I don’t know if you can see it or not, but those were the buildings that existed in the OpenStreetMap database at the time of import. Which means that it’s it was a huge addition to be working on the data. We basically had no buildings. So that’s why we decided to run this import in the first place. What is the current state of the import? On the task manager currently it shows 20% of the manual review process, but as I’ve said, 84,000 buildings have already been uploaded. We want to improve this number. Because this is pretty low. So that’s why actually I’m here. Because I need your input. I will need you to tell me how to engage people. So for outreach, we have we’ve tried several mappers. First, we tried to contact active local mappers. You know? OpenStreetMap members who have a story in MiamiDade County. Then we organized regular Maptime meetups. And on all the social media platforms you could think of. And the third part of our outreach was the student outreach at the University of Florida. There were two courses, GIS programming and GIS analysis that I was TA’ing. We saw that this import process was related to what we have been doing in those classes. So I would just quickly go through these different approaches. And we’ll just present how they worked. So when I say I contacted the top 50 contributors, I’m talking about the mappers already. I downloaded the set and I was looking at all the contributions that was found in MiamiDade County. Just aggregated the data and just got a list of user names. It was just an introductory mail in the OpenStreetMap message system telling them, hey, we are in Miami, we are planning to do an import. I see you are doing some great work in Miami. I would like you to help us. Also, I just told everything that you had a GitHub page, Slack channel, Facebook, blah, blah, blah. And I also asked them to join our next Maptime meetup. So how do it go? Well, I contacted 50 mappers. I got a response from eight people. Which is actually not that bad. But five of them told me that they are not able to help because they are busy. They don’t live in Miami actually. They were in a different location. Three of them said they might contribute and they like the idea a lot. And two of them actually kind of contributed. Not by adding buildings to the map, but by reviewing the data and providing OpenStreetMap notes if they noticed some issues with it. So it’s like offering fixes. And actually that was a great help. So I shouldn’t have used red color, I guess. They helped a lot. But the magnitude of this outreach technique is, well, I expected something better, actually. It was two out of 50. So I don’t know where it came from. All right. So also, like a fun fact. Because I thought that this list is going to contain local mappers. Because, you know, that’s what we used to think about OpenStreetMap. But it’s relying on local knowledge. But it turns out that out of the 50, 13 people are working for the map data team. So for the next iterations, I might need better definitions of local mappers. Because this isn’t working. Okay. The second approach is the general Maptime activities that we have been doing. We have held pretty much a meeting every month at the time of the import. Some of them were really wellattended, some of them, not so much. Anyway, we tried our best to reach out to people and engage them in mapping. We also introduced everything on our Facebook channel, and I also had my OpenStreetMap profile just in case someone clicks on it. And with this map, we have gained 19 mappers. 19 mappers who actually sat down in front of our tasking manager. Took the time to read the introductions, actually downloaded our dataset and uploaded the data back to OpenStreetMap. Which is way better than the previous. And also, I put there we have reached around 2 hundred users. And by this, I mean that the buildings already on OpenStreetMap by either the automatic means or some previous human mapper, you know, these buildings are being further added. so some people attach more information to them like names or maybe they just refined the geometry. Which is also a good thing. And the third approach that we have used is in the GIS programming and analysis classes at the University of Florida. In the GIS analysis class, we have been teaching it to them. So they are socialized in the products that are different from OpenStreetMap. So we figured it would be very interesting for them to see an open source project. I also told a lot more about the technicalities. Like all the tools that we have developed. And for the other class, GIS analysis, they are going to be GIS professionals, so, again, the idea was that they might be interested in learning about data sources and different places than GIS. The class format is actually a distance class because I’m not located in Gainesville where the main campus of the University of Florida is. I’m down in Fort Lauderdale. And a lot of students scattered around Florida, Miami and others. A lot of them don’t live in Gainesville. Anyway, it was a distance class. So we needed to record lectures and stuff. So the way we implemented it, and it’s an extra credit assignment. For 5% of the final grade. We also handed out the assignment description, obviously. An import tutorial which is kind of like a stepbystep guide. Go to this Website, download these and add other buildings like that. So that was very detailed. And I also did a live demo like where I actually sat down in front of the computer, showed them everything. Just talked about the basics of OpenStreetMap. And also, I showed them so, like, this is how you map. Which could use some UX love, I would say. So I needed to do the lecture and record it. So go back and check it one more time. So how was the participation? I think I forgot to put the number. But we had more than 50 students in these two classes. And out of the 50 students, 17 decided to hand the assignment in. Two of the assignments were, well, like it was I shouldn’t say harmful, but it was not good assignments. So I need to revert a few chain sets. But the remaining 15 actually were really good. So I think I rated them 100%. It was useful. They took the time. They got to know OpenStreetMap. That’s what I wanted. The grade distribution. Because my idea before doing this was like, oh, okay, it’s going to be like the students who don’t need the extra 5%. But it turns out that that was not necessarily the case. Eight of the assignments from students who got an A and only two of them needed the extra 5% to reach an A grade by the end of the semester. Also, two of them, because of the extra credit assignment, achieved more than 100% in the class, which is pretty cool. Out of the B students, no one needed the extra credit to get a B. So I guess why they tried is to somehow make their grades up to an A. But they couldn’t do it for some reason. And for the one student who received a C, he really did this extra 5%. Okay. So let’s talk about the time frame and the activity. Just to see whether we can figure out if any of these methods can increase participation. Oh, yeah, I think it seems we started it, I think, last spring. Maybe May 2016, I think. Yes. So anyway, when I plotted the activity related to this import, I noticed a lot of peaks and then, like, a lot of areas where there were no activity at all. And then I was just trying to kind of reverse engineer. Try to figure out what happened in regard to these peaks. And the first two, right after the introduction and then the implementation of the import, the first two peaks were because of Maptime Miami meetups. And then there was the due date of the first class. Which didn’t do anything. Actually I only got one student out of that class. Obviously, it doesn’t show up in this plot. There’s something I call “Random mapping.” I will tell you more about it later. But actually it’s not related to any of the activities that were in there. And then the big peak in the middle of the graph is related to the second class, the GIS analysis class, why I have gotten 16 submissions, I think. So there was a lot of addition to this import class. And then again, there was another period with no activity. Then again, this random mapping thing. So by this general mapping, what I mean is that these contributions are from people who I do not know through Maptime Miami. Who I haven’t met in my life. So they have figured out about the import or they just browsed the OpenStreetMap and that’s how they got to know about it and then they decided to contribute. Which is really cool. So, yeah. Just a few points about the lessons that I’ve learned about this. I got some really nice comments from students which was, they were like some of them were saying that she didn’t realize it was so relaxing to sit down in front of a computer and map. To add buildings. But unfortunately, despite all the positive feedback that I have gotten from them, no one stayed active. So as of today they have not done any more mapping in OpenStreetMap, sadly. Also, another thing that I noticed that OpenStreetMap can be very, very confusing for people who don’t yet know it and who are socialized in different GIS products. Because, honestly, I had the tasking manager instance, we had the Wiki page, we had some tutorial in GitHub, and there was the OpenStreetMap Website. There was the for them, not for me. So they just got confused, like, oh, my god. I’m contributing to OpenStreetMap, but what is OpenStreetMap, really? So I think I have lost a lot of students because of this. So for the future I will need to find a way to clarify this and make it more appealing to them. And in general, it was just way harder than expected to motivate people and get them to sit down and do some mapping. On the bright side, there was several good examples. For example, this map oh, yeah. So I just looked up all the users in my task manager and then I excised the chain sets to see the spatial pattern. And actually some of them who got to know OpenStreetMap through this import took the time and effort in mapping their home regions. There was a guy from Bangladesh, and participated in the project. And went back to their home buildings. It was interesting to see. I would like to throw an open question. What else should I do to get more mappers in Miami and get it going a little bit? So if you have any experience in this, I would really like to get some feedback and advice. If not, then just thanks for listening. Thank you. [ Applause ] Questions? AUDIENCE: Hello. Because of if you need a lot of money from FEMA to rebuild a building, it would be on the damage. But on OpenStreetMap they have talked to FEMA, and they will help people building out there. And in Florida, you know So the question was that whether we have done something in Florida to work with FEMA. We have not, actually. I don’t know the reason why we did not. Sorry, we are running a little behind. We don’t have any more time for questions. Find him at the break. We’re going to break for a few minutes and come right back. Thanks.