One hot July evening ten years ago, I found my way to a bar somewhere near the Barbican in London and descended down the stairs into the basement space for the MapSwipe launch party. At the door I was handed my name sticker and asked to fill in the number of square kilometres I had already swiped on the app. I duly filled in my 597 sq km and joined the party.

MapSwipe is an open-source mobile app where you swipe through satellite imagery and help identify features. The app was created as part of the Missing Maps project to help solve a problem we had in the early days. Mappers like myself would be asked to map an area to help a humanitarian project but we would open task after task with very little in it to actually map. So, the simple, but genius, idea behind MapSwipe is what if volunteers could do a first pass through the area and pick out the features that need to be mapped; then this smaller area could be presented to mappers to trace the data and add it to OpenStreetMap.

It is very quick and easy to use MapSwipe to contribute to humanitarian mapping. Download the app and create your account, then choose a project on the front page, do the tutorial, and start swiping away and tapping on the screen every time you spot a feature you’ve been asked to find. However, on the evening of the party we had an unfortunate problem.

The only photo I took all evening.

At the beginning of the party, it was announced that there were prizes for the two people who mapped the most that evening. The idea was to listen to the speeches, mingle with other partygoers, and swipe. The problem was that the Wi-Fi did not work! People struggled to download the app on the night, and you couldn’t really use it in the basement bar.

As a member of the London Missing Maps community I’d heard about the development of this app and before the launch party given the opportunity to download the app and test it out. I had enjoyed testing it out and swiping at home and on my commute and this is why I rocked up to the event with 597 sq km of mapping under my belt. As there was so little mapping to be done at the party the competition rules were changed to the winners being the ones with the most square kilometres mapped – and that is how I ended up with a lovely hand drawn MapSwipe t-shirt as a prize!

Photo by Aga Kreglewska

The t-shirt was sweet, but it did get modified before I wore it next. I chopped of the collar and added some more colour to it by adding blue cloth down the sides. Here I am wearing it at the next mapathon in London in August 2016 (where I was sharing my experience of validating at mapathons).

Over the past ten years 136,000 contributors have made 216 million swipes to map together for humanitarian action using MapSwipe. The project types have increased on the mobile and web app as this small but mighty tool keeps moving forwards. The launch party was on the 19th of July 2016 so next week we can celebrate ten years of this remarkable idea made into an app that continues to make a difference. I’m glad I was there at the launch, and I can’t wait to see what comes next. Happy birthday MapSwipe!

MapSwipe: https://mapswipe.org

Missing Maps: https://missingmaps.org/