[HOT] Update on the India flooding priorities

[Andrew Buck]

We had a skype chat with the ground representative working with MapAction
and SEEDS in India on the Uttarakhand flood response.  The discussions are
still informal yet, and we don't have firm commitments that the data will
be used by people on the ground, however progress toward this front is
being made and we hope that we will continue to firm up this relationship
and get a two way flow of information going where we are able to get back
data from them as well.

We discussed what their current priorities for data were and how we could
help them achieve their goals in the field.  At the moment they are trying
to divide up the villages in the region amongst the many aid agencies that
are responding so that each village is covered by one specific aid agency
with as little overlap and duplication as possible.  In order to aid in
this effort they have asked us to begin by simply locating all of the
villages in the affected region and trying to add names for as many as
possible.  Pierre and I have merged in the GNS names for all the villages
available in that database, but there are still a lot more left to mark.

The idea was to create a task manager job to simply draw
landuse=residential polygons around the remaining villages so that even if
they don't have a name in the database, they can at least use this
information to decide what agency will help what village.  We will probably
do more detailed tracing later on after the agencies get more settled in,
but for now, just identifying all the villages in the area is the key focus.

Here is the URL for the task manager job, just trace the village outlines
and don't worry about roads or buildings yet:

http://tasks.hotosm.org/job/274

Thanks to the community for their continued involvement in this task.  It
is still not to the level of being an activation yet, still just an
informal mapping project, but it seems like these aid agencies are going to
be in this area for a while now, so we may move to formal activation if we
get more communication with them in the future.

-AndrewBuck
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