[HOT] Matthew

Pierre Béland pierzenh at yahoo.fr
Wed Feb 22 16:22:41 UTC 2017


Hi all,
Mapping for disaster response is to support NGO's and assure a good territory management. Mountains in Grand'Anse and Sud department are quite particular with people spread everywhere.  Both houses, road and path networks are important.
I am just back from the UNOGA - Potentiel 3.0 mission with Fred and others in the mountain valley around Despagne, Grand'Anse. People in this 1,000 meter altitude valley are spread in the various hills and live for subistance agriculture. Walking in the valley, we saw destructed houses everywhere. People are still waiting for substantial help 4 months after the hurricane. Nights are very cold and humid. Houses, tools, livestock, plants and seeds were lost. While the majority of houses are destructed, we saw very few reconstuction or roof repairs. So far, NGO's have concentrated their efforts in the more accessible areas along the National road.  

We visited many families in the valley.  They used debris from the hurricane to build temporary shelters next to their destroyed stone houses. Their situation is very precarious. Many health problems are reported and no permanent health clinic in the valley except a 1 day/month clinic. It takes three hours by truck to go to the clinic in Leon. These families live from subsistence farming. They are currently undernourished and the aid received is still too minimal.
Talking about mapping, let's be clear.  Various actions need to be taken to assure a good coverage and qualit of data.

We need images clear and detailed enough to spot houses, paths and highways. Various images with various quality, dates and offsets were used to cover the Matthew huricane disaster area. In this context it was difficult for newcomers to interpret the imagery and provide good data.

When we discuss about quality of data, we do not say that this is the responsability of newcomers. They need more support and monitoring from the organizers of mapathons and the OSM humanitarian community. In 2016, prior to the october hurricane, various Mapathons were organized to map Haiti. The Disaster response was concentrated in the first 2 weeks of october. But badly, not enough efforts to correct the data in these two weeks and since then. Read again https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/hot/2016-November/012673.html

Other then assure the quality of the data for this ungoing disaster response, tools should be developped to monitor each Mapathon and support Mapathon organizers providing more support and feedback to the newcomers The people that organize mapathons should accept the responsability to provide better quality.  

In the past more experienced mappers did contribute to Disaster responses. It was then ok to say that others will correct later while the majority of contributors where experienced. In the last two years we often discussed about the impact to organize mapathons and bring thousand of new contributors to participate in a short period of time to mapathons. Read again discussions for the Nepal response and the report that I wrote after. 

The Tasking manager simply help to distribute efforts to cover mapping and validation of each square.  This need to be completed with Monitoring tools that cover a complete area or a particular group contribution. Otherwise OSM will loose it's credibility as the de facto Map for disaster response.  We cannot accept the answer that other people will come later and correct the data.
Monitoring and Quality tools are important to collectively provide a better OSM map to support humanitarian actions and better follow newcomers edit:- live tools that can follow the Group activity and spot rapidly the type of problems and individual contributors errors. 
- Have tools for Mapathons organizers to report the list of contributors
- Quality data tools that can monitor a specific area would also help to come back to a particular area and evaluate what's need to be corrected.
Quality is more important then quantity.  Covering the map with so many errors, we discourage the more experience mappers.  

regard   
Pierre 


      De : john whelan <jwhelan0112 at gmail.com>
 À : Fred Moine <frmoine at gmail.com> 
Cc : HOT <hot at openstreetmap.org>
 Envoyé le : mercredi 22 février 2017 10h30
 Objet : Re: [HOT] Matthew
   
Data quality is always an issue and we don't have enough validators which doesn't help.

We also have user expectations.  If you want to use OSM in a particular area with low internet access perhaps you could arrange with someone to run an eye over the area first?  With a large number of different mappers mapping by hand I think you must expect some inconsistences. I've even seen mappers with more than two years experience tagging in a way that didn't follow local guidelines.

We know if we catch mappers making mistakes within the first 24 hours the errors go down after that.  Crisis mapping is always going to be lots of new people wanting to help.  In Nepal I think 70% of the mappers were first time mappers and if you think data quality is bad in Haiti then Nepal was off the scale.

Since the recent changes to the task manager, iD and the training guides I have seen the number of errors decrease.

What I have noticed is some projects are better managed than others.  I think a recent one I looked at the bottom 25% of the project had no mapable imagery from Bing or other sources.  Other African projects have instructions that do not follow the African highway wiki.  The problem here is by not presenting a consistent professional image to the mappers it gives the impression that we don't care, and that this stuff isn't very important.

Currently validation isn't anyone's responsibility.  Perhaps as part of the project plan check list the project managers should be asked what plans do they have to ensure that 50% of new mappers work will be validated within 48 hours or whatever the magic window Martin's work shows and that does not include asking me to validate yet another project. I have my own idiosyncrasies about which I validate on and it does take a fair bit of time and effort to do it right.  

I sympathise with the idea of commenting "Just clean up this mess!" but recognise Blake's comment of pat them on the head and make them feel a little happier is valid as well.  For the most part we are talking volunteers so persuasion works best, having said that something very interesting is taking place in Lusaka.  I'm fairly certain from the mapping being done that although the mappers are new to OSM they do know GIS and the quality of mapping is very high.  Project 2543 is an example.  There has also been some work counting buildings etc using R and the local level of government seem to be involved.

Cheerio John

   
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