[HOT] Geobucket

[Reinier Battenberg]

Hi,


Sorry for the delay, we wanted to fix a last minute bug. But here is more news 
from Uganda.

Here we go:

http://www.geobucket.org/

twitter: @geobucket

github: https://github.com/davidebukali/geobucket

And the Android app: 
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.geo.bucket&feature=search_result#?t=W251bGwsMSwyLDEsImNvbS5nZW8uYnVja2V0Il0.

The idea of geobucket is very simple: people with GeoBucket installed, just 
collect traces by pressing the Start button in the display. 
When they are home, they press the Stop button.
Then, to upload the data, they press the Upload button.

That is all our target audience needs to do.

On the server, we put all these lines & dots on the map.

Once an area has a workable coverage, we need to find some people that feel 
like tracing the lines into roads on OSM.

Hopefully, people who run GeoBucket, and people who like tracing, team up all 
around the unmapped world and get things going using our tool.

For example, here in Uganda, the northeast has very limited coverage. This is 
a very poor area, that can be dangerous sometimes. So there is not a lot of 
mapping on the ground going to happen.
However, there are a lot of iNGO's in very big cars driving around the area. 
The people in these cars are, on average, no geeks that love to use their very 
limited bandwidth on their secured compounds for evenings of mapping.
We hope, they dont mind to run GeoBucket though, and when they are in Kampala, 
press the upload button.

We'll take it from there.

And what we actually do, is store all uploads in a big PostGIS table, and then 
render lines & dots from that table, using a Geoserver instance.

When you load our WMS layer in JOSM, you see all the uploads, and can use them 
for tracing roads.

Being able to use the taskmanager, would be really helpful, later on.

I hope that explains a bit more of our intentions with GeoBucket. If you have 
more questions, feel free to ask.
If you would like to lend a hand to David, who wrote the Android app, feel 
free to fork.
And if you want some pointers of how we configured Drupal to do this, without 
writing a single line of php, let me know too.


rgds,

On behalf of the whole GeoBucket team,
Reinier

PS The idea is very similar to the work that Mikel did in Swaziland 
http://groundtruthinitiative.org/2011/10/03/what-to-do-with-10-million-gps-
points/


On Monday 13 August 2012 15:02:02 Kate Chapman wrote:
> Hi Reinier,
> 
> I'm not quite sure what the workflow would be with the Tasking
> Manager. Can you explain a little bit more?
> 
> How will people know what the dots are through the WMS? Is this going
> to be simple symbols?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> -Kate
> 
> On Sun, Aug 12, 2012 at 11:49 PM, Reinier Battenberg
> 
> <reinier.battenberg at mountbatten.net> wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > We are very close to release a first beta version of our Geobucket Android
> > app into the wild.
> > 
> > The app allows anyone with an Android phone to just collect dots and have
> > them uplloaded to the Geobucket site.
> > 
> > We think there are a lot of people who do not mind to contribute their
> > dots, but do not have the time to do the actual mapping.
> > 
> > We hope people all over the world, especially in regions where satelite
> > imagery is not that good yet, will start collecting dots.
> > 
> > Individuals or small groups can use our WMS server & Josm to do the
> > tracing, but for bigger groups and bigger regions, we the task manager
> > would be a real handy tool.
> > 
> > Would it be ok for us to send people to HOT to request tasks to be set up,
> > based on Geobucket data. Even if that would mean regions where there is no
> > immenent Humanitarian issues?
> > 
> > (I do realize the taskmanager software is open and we could set up our
> > own. I would not mind doing that eventually, for the time being its not
> > within our limited resources.)
> > 
> > 
> > --
> > rgds,
> > 
> > Reinier Battenberg
> > Director
> > Mountbatten Ltd.
> > www.mountbatten.net
> > tel: +256 758 801749
> > twitter: @batje
> > 
> > _______________________________________________
> > HOT mailing list
> > HOT at openstreetmap.org
> > http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/hot
-- 
rgds,

Reinier Battenberg
Director 
Mountbatten Ltd.
www.mountbatten.net
tel: +256 758 801749
twitter: @batje