MapCampaigner: Future of field mapping – Transcription

Our final speaker is Tyler Radford who is the executive director of HOT. You have probably heard HOT like a thousand times together. It’s not referring to the weather outside. It’s the humanitarian OpenStreetMap team. So it’s my pleasure to introduce Tyler. We have 20 minutes until lunch just as a reference. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us just before lunch. I hope you heard a little bit about HOT in the last two presentations. I’m going to tell you a little bit more. For those of you who haven’t been keeping track of what we have been doing the past couple years. Just a quick update on some of the activities and new programs that we have from the past year. And then also we’re going to do a little demo of some of our newest tools. And one of those is called Map Campaigner. So when we think about I’m going to talk a little bit about the concept of mapping campaigns. When we think about campaigns over the years, there’s many different types of mapping campaigns that have been run. So this is this was one of my favorites. The big baseball project, 2011. So this was all about locating and mapping baseball diamonds throughout the U.S. I believe this was organized by Harry Wood and there was something like 14,000 edits made. Very specific. Very specific mapping project. Here’s another one, realmap.org. This is all about mapping accessibility. So physical accessibility to buildings. Things like is a building wheelchair accessible? A recent one from the past year or so has been tagging in support of women and girls. And this is mapping mapping features around us that might have a particular relevance to women, young women and girls. And these are it really could be anything from educational facilities to women’s health facilities, et cetera. All right? If you look at the OpenStreetMap Wiki under mapping projects, you’ll see there’s this huge variety of things. And these were just a few examples. There’s other projects around mapping water supply, mapping infrastructure. The list goes on and on. So I’m going to talk a little bit about what HOT is and what’s HOT’s specific interest in mapping campaigns. You might know us for our work around disaster mapping. So since the Haiti earthquake in 2011, we have been leading these very largescale disaster and crisis rapid response activations. We’ve had more than 45,000 contributors. Many of you in the room who have worked with us over the years to rapidly to respond to crises sort of on a rapid onset basis. Something we have been working on since 2015 is the Missing Maps project to get out there before crisis and map areas around the world that have particular vulnerabilities. And this is just one of those projects which Rachel mentioned earlier. This is mapping for malaria information. Really incredible project. And we worked with DigitalGlobe on this one. I believe it was in nine countries, covering more than half a million square kilometers. And pretty close to 5 million buildings mapped. So that’s the remote mapping work we’re doing. But a big priority for HOT over the last seven years since our founding has been to support and grow OSM communities around the world. We realize that OSM communities are just core to what we do. And we launched a new program this year called the Microgrants Program. This is supporting nine communities around the world with the basics that they need to get started. Sort of seed funding so they can undertake mapping projects. This was for things such as equipment, training, to hold mapathons. The nine communities, Tanzania, Niger, Mozambique, Colombia. As we move into 2018, we’re really fortunate to have support from Net Hope via the Google Foundation, or Google.org. This will provide $120,000 of equipment to OSM communities around the world. Including phones, GPS devices, laptops, printers. All the basic sort of hardware that somebody would need in order to map. Another priority for us is supporting OSM communities on mapping campaigns on the ground. So actually working on the ground doing what some people call “Field data collection,” field mapping on the ground mapping continues to be really critical for us. so we’re doing this at very large scale also in some of the world’s most difficult contexts. So right now working in Jakarta, Indonesia. This is the secondlargest metropolitan area in the world. Mapping the entire infrastructure across the city. In Tanzania, this is Africa’s fastestgrowing city. And we’re working with a team of more than 300 students right now to cover the entire city and map critical infrastructure. Especially drainage infrastructure which is of critical importance during the rainy season when Dar Es Salaam is experiencing heavy flooding. So each of those campaigns is capturing different types of data attributes. Another one and this is something we started working on in the past year. The South Sudanese refugee crisis in Uganda. There are over 1 million South Sudanese refuging in the northern part of the country. And we’re working to map the settlements where they’re relocating. And these are some of the types of features we’re collecting are things like drainage, latrines, water, access to water and water points. And it’s not only mapping the location of these things, but mapping very specific attributes. So, for example, we might know that there’s a latrine in this location, but is it welllighted? Is it accessible to women? Is it safe at night? So these are all the types of features and attributes that we’re capturing. So this is a photo from just one of the settlements. There’s over a dozen settlements in Northern Uganda. This is where over 6,000 shelters have been set up. So when we think about a mapping campaign and organizing these really largescale efforts, it can be incredibly complex just due to the logistics involved, getting our teams out there, getting volunteers involved. Making sure people are collecting the data that we want to collect. And that’s meaningful. So when we talk about a mapping campaign, it generally has specific characteristics. So number one, collect geospatial data for a specific purpose, there’s features in the attributes we collect. Defined geographical area. Likely time bound, so complete in a month or three months or six months’ time. And it requires a pool of people out there on the ground to actually collect the data. So this can either be a tightlymanaged team of highlytrained staff people, could be volunteers, could be a mix of two. So you saw a few of the challenges that we were presented with in some difficult places like Northern Uganda. Another question that we were asked recently by one of our partners is how could we crowd source the location and very specific attributes for every school in Colombia? And it sounds like a really it sounds like something we should have already. Or should be able to do really easily. But when you get down to it, it’s really difficult because of the many of the locations are quite inaccessible. And just the transport and logistics is difficult and quite costly to actually deploy people throughout the country to collect this data. So I’ll talk a little bit about how some of the tools we’re developing address these challenges. When we’re planning an on the ground mapping project, these are some of the common ingredients. So typically the first step is to figure out, what do we want to map and why do we want to map it? Determining the area of interest. So where are we working? Defining the data model? So the types of data that we’ll be collecting. Selecting the imagery. So sometimes you can collect part of the data remotely. So, for example, you can collect building footprints remotely before you send your team out on the ground to collect more detail on those buildings. You then set up software. Set up your data collection software. So we use Open Map Kit, OSM tracker and other tools to do data collection. You’d get out there and collect the data using those mobile devices, using GPS devices. And then when you’re back at your desk, do some quality assurance to validate the quality of that data. And that could be done in a number of tools. We use JOSM and a number of other tools to help with that data validation. So lots of stuff here. Really some basic steps, but there’s a lot of intricacies behind this. One of the tools that we use for the remote mapping piece, and I just wanted to call this out in particular, is the tasking manager. You have seen some screenshots already from earlier today. This is our new version, version 3. It’s now live at tasks.hotosm.org. This is part of the remote mapping using satellite imagery. If you haven’t seen the new version, check it out. We need your feedback, love it or hate it. We need to continue to get better. So please check it out. I mentioned a few of the challenges already about planning and organizing these really largescale mapping campaigns on the ground. So number one, just getting around is really expensive and complicated to get people to very remote areas, especially in areas where we might not have paved roads or the roads are flooded for half of the year and things like that. Barriers to entry. Some of our data collection tools are still too complicated for the everyday user to use. So they still require training. We would like to get to the point where literally anybody can contribute, not just we’ve made the remote mapping process really easy. But we have a lot of work to do on the fieldbased data collection and making tools that anyone can sort of contribute their local knowledge of the places they live with zero training or with zero barriers to entry. Organizing these largescale campaigns. So it’s hard to know right now you need to there’s ways to do it, but you need to use many different tools to figure out who is contributing to a mapping campaign, where are they doing it? What areas have been fully covered? Or not covered? Where are the gaps in data? And then finally data quality. It’s hard to define sorry. It’s easy to define what data you want to collect, but it’s really hard to monitor, as people are out there on the ground collecting that data, what’s the status of that data collection? And it’s hard to incentivize highquality contributions. It’s hard to monitor specifically what each person or each volunteer mapper is contributing. And it’s not easy to see via one place what some of the data gaps are or issues are. And this is really where we get to the development of a new tool called MapCampaigner. So I’m going it ask my colleague, Nate Smith, to come up. Nate was one of our technical project managers who really helped to conceptual lyse and envision what it’s going to look like. He’s now HOT’s director of technology innovation. If you have any questions about any of our tech tools, Nate’s the guy to talk to. So I’m going to pass it off to him. Two for the price of one. Thanks. All right. So we’re going to do a live demo at a conference. [ Applause ] So bear with me. Also, if you want to go to I’ve never told people this this many people all at once. Go to campaigns.hotosm.org. We’ll see if is crashes everything. All right. So I’m going to do this. Looking backwards. So when you go to campaigns.hotosm.org, you’re going to see a landing page and the campaigns right now. Should be fairly optimized for mobile. And you can click on a place like say I’m organizing a campaign. I want to collect restaurants and cafes in Ottawa. So what I can do is set up an AOI and define the things that I want to collect. And what you’ll see it then you’ll be given a dashboard and you start to monitor that. Let me back up really quick and say, and walk you through that process. Oh. Let me log in. I should have done this earlier. Oh. I’m going skip that, actually. I don’t have passwords on my last pass. Let me so let’s say you’ve created a campaign and so you have your you want to sign in? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I want to walk through the process. Because yeah. We planned this last minute. So sorry about this. Hit “Never.” And then” Grant access.” Yeah. All right. We’re logged in. So let’s say we’re planning a campaign. Here in Boulder. And we want to map cafes because we want to find some good coffee. But we want to make sure that all the cafes in Boulder have the right attributes that we’re looking for. So I can set a start date and so I’m going to set we started this here yesterday. And we’re going to go until the end of the year because it might take a little while for us to do this. I’m going to give a little description. So as we get a little details, metadata, and now I want to define what I want to collect. So I’m going to select some predefined categories. So one of these is cafes. And what you’ll see is that we we are predefining not just amenity equals cafe, but a number of other attributes that really help track all the attributes that we want to collect. I’m for the purposes of this demo, I’m only going to be looking at the name. Make sure that every cafe in Boulder has a name. And managers. I’m going to put my name as well here. Add to manager. So multiple people can oversee this campaign. And next I’m going to create a defined area of interest that I want to track. Go to Boulder. Okay. Great. And then what I’m going to do is just a small square kind of around here. What’s interesting here is what Tyler was talking about, not just tracking what’s happening in the area, but also tracking the coverage of an area. I’m going to come back to this campaign setup because I want to show one example of so instead of defining one area they’re tracking let’s say we want to split up an area into three different teams. So team one team three has been assigned to a certain section in downtown Ottawa. Team two is a middle section, they’re actually incomplete yet. Team one, which started a month ago is already complete. And so we can define the status of what those teams are doing and the progress of that. And that helps show what are the areas covered? Across the campaign? For this demo, I’m just doing one area. But we can come back to that. I want to define a name. And I’m going to submit and it’s going to start generating my campaign. So we had a dashboard. And we can see that there’s 64 cafes in this area. And what we have been a big thing about quality that we have been thinking about has been attribute completeness. So not just that a cafe exists, but there’s other attributes about that cafe. Opening time. What kind of other cuisine do they serve? For this campaign I just said, “Name.” So what you’ll see is a percentage of completeness for each feature in this area. From zero to 100%. You can see these are all green because they have at least a name. We’re getting a sense okay. Great. This is a pretty good completeness. Although it says 0%. That’s an error. And then over the past month two people have engaged. And one of those persons is hopefully in the room. Jennings, are you in the room? Yes. So you can see that okay. You have been a part of this campaign already. And then the last part is, and many so the in the way that we designed this has been really through a lot of input and testing with our field projects. So many of our project managers based in Tanzania, Uganda and Indonesia have given a lot of feedback. And a big point of this is how to monitor what are we calling errors or completeness errors? And being able to follow up with the editors or being able to download a file with all the errors and make a bulk edit and update those to fix those errors. So we’re tracking everything from the completeness stuff, but the naming issues. We can do a lot of stuff with OSM CHA. And our own custom, did things get capitalized, right? Spelling mistakes? We’re really only looking at completeness now. That’s a quick so if you’re looking on mobile and you have maps.me installed, you can open it up and start contributing. We are extending features on that. Be able to open up maps.me with your bounding box. You can see where this could go. Maybe I could already be assigned to this and I know what area I need to edit. I know what attributes I need to contribute to this campaign. And I think there’s some there’s a lot of potential and we’re only scratching the surface with this first version. We haven’t launched it yet. We have been we have kind of been soft launching this internally with our projects and starting to do some training around this. But over the next month, you’ll be hearing more and so if you have feedback, join us online. Or talk to me over the next day. We can do more I can do more demos. I can get into the guts of this as well and we can talk more about it. So thank you. All right, thanks, Nate. [ Applause ] So should we go to lunch? Or do we want to do questions? I heard a whoohoo for lunch. Let’s go to lunch. If you have questions, come up and talk to them. If you have a boxed lunch, if we put a little happy face on your thing, the boxed lunches are right out there, ready to go. If you’re doing the catered lunch, you’re going to take the elevators down and walk around. It’s like a threeminute walk, and you’ll end up in that building. Quick announcement, I forgot to make it earlier. Please join the OSM Foundation. Everything we showed today is really reliant on the technology and the infrastructure provided by the Foundation. Only 20 great British pounds per year. [Lunch]