[HOT] Meeting of the Togo Support Team - July 2, 2013

Andrew Buck andrew.r.buck at gmail.com
Tue Jul 2 22:50:08 UTC 2013


We have had our second meeting of the experimental support team assisting
the ground team in Togo.  We plan to continue meeting once per day
continuing forward to keep the community informed of the situation on the
ground.  Even though the email about the first meeting yesterday was late
in getting our to the list (and therefore has only been up for a few hours)
we have already had some interest in helping with the ground team, so thank
you to the people who have already offered support.



Overview:

There was less to discuss tonight as the situation has not changed on the
ground from yesterday.  Most of the discussion was focused on preparation
for future deployments and collaboration.



Current Needs:

The ground teams are trying to set up QGIS on windows and are having
problems with crashes in the install process (seems to be related to Visual
Basic).  If there are HOTties who have experience with this issue help
would be appreciated.

They are moving forward with discussions with the national forestry
department of Togo, however discussions are still in their early stages and
the forestry reps are unfamiliar with OSM.  It was suggested that general
mapping of landuse is good but no specific goals for the forestry project
have been established.  Nicolas is going to try to get us an area to use as
a "test area" for forestry mapping tomorrow.

The solicitation for translators put out yesterday continues (one response
so far).  We still don't have a list of what to translate but it will be
blog posts (French to English) and other similar kinds of text.  The list
should be ready tomorrow.



For discussion:

Internet is quite slow in these developing countries and so the idea was
discussed of preloading the JOSM imagery cache with Bing (and possibly
other) imagery data for the area where the computers will be sent.  These
imagery caches would not be shared publicly, just loaded onto our field
computers and then sent out so that they make fewer requests over the net
for imagery tiles as most can be met by the cache.  We would like to know
if this is OK to do as per the license agreements we have with Bing.

Finally, before the field team moves on to Burkina Faso to set up the next
volunteer mapping team they will have access to high speed internet to
prepare the computers they will deliver to Burkina Faso.  We should try to
preload these computers with as much software as they are likely to need,
as well as any large files that would make sense to load on them so they do
not have to be downloaded "in country".  We have started a wiki page at the
address below to aggregate a list of these things.  Please contribute any
suggestions you think may be useful.

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Humanitarian_OSM_Team/Preparing_field_mission


Thanks again to those who contributed since the last summary email went out
and we look forward to hearing your feedback going forward.

Signed,
The Members of the Togo Experimental Support Team

Pierre Béland
Andrew Buck
Will Skora
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