OpenStreetMap
This is a about what I have learned most recently by being involved as a contributor to, and organiser of the “mapping sprint” or “mapathon” called #StayHomeAndMapIRL.This is written in my own voice as an individual mapper.
The mapping sprint was a week long, and really grew out of a spontaneous confluence of two things:
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The mapping campaign #osmIRL_buildings for which we use a task manager
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The necessity of everyone in Ireland to stay home, as part of the Covid-19 emergency
By combining these two we were creating an immediacy and dot-joining exercise between something people were all experiencing, and something useful to do with the time at home.
Our community agreed at the 2019 AGM to have a mapping task, one where participation was voluntary like always, but it would be the “common ground” for mappers. Some deep thought went into choosing buildings as the focus, not least being that openstreetmap for Ireland seems to lag behind in the completeness of the buildings. Typically, a large Irish town or city could have a small number of buildings mapped, even in the town centres, almost as if buildings were not a significant human feature and not a major part of the detail of any map at the end-user scale. Of course the wider point is that working at this scale adding a feature like buildings allows our community to scale up and down, and by that I mean add useful end user things like details about the buildings, or scale up and create better de facto landuses - ultimately to increase the completeness and usefulness of the map.
The week through insights taught me the following things:
