[HOT] The point on the OSM Response to the DR Congo Nord Kivu Ebola outbreak

[Pierre Béland]

The media reported recently about the current Ebola outbreak in Nord Kivu and the difficulty for the humanitarians to operate in a difficult security context with rebels around towns plus population displacements in response to various attacks.  

After Beni, the efforts are now concentrated around Butembu. The population of this town is increasing rapidly.The DR Congo health department, the World Health Organization and MSF need good evaluations of population for vaccination campaigns.  In this context, OSM-DRC has obtained recent imagery courtesy of USAID that shows many new buildings. 

We would like assure a quick response but are faced with quality problems. This week, we started new a job for Bulembo, east of Butembo with new imagery.  https://tasks.hotosm.org/project/5585With good imagery and a rural area, it seemed to us that this job would fit for newbies.  But we rapidly observed on the map more and more overlaps and imprecise building tracing.

We then used the Irregular shapes indicator that we developped a few months ago to quantify these problems. The indicator offers us a measure of the problem and let us validate the individual buildings reported as needing close evaluation of builidings quality problems (shapes + overlaps).  
https://opendatalabrdc.github.io/Blog/#!index.md
Looking at project 5585, we observe :
- on dec.5 with beginners, participation, 3,025 buildings were edited but 40.2% with irregular shapes
- on dec.6 with beginners excluded,  3,471 buildings were edited with only 0.9% with irregular shapes.  

The OSM-DRC coordination team is also faced with a high ratio builidngs bad quality + overlaps for the densely town of Butembu : TM 5485, 5487 and 5507.

This is caused by various factors, including dense urban area, dark imagery, different offsets between imagery plus often very imprecise building tracing from newbies.  Observing the multiplication of problems this week for Butembu, including a high ratio of building overlaps with roads, we have decided to archive the current jobs for Butembu.  The option seems to start over with the new imagery and first realign buildings and roads before adding new buildings.  And the jobs would be reserved to experienced mappers. The Tasking manager offers options to select intermediate contributors. We should add jobs in the next days to revise Butembu.
We also need to discuss how to better integrate the participation of the newbies  in disaster mapping and at the same time assure both a quick answer and high quality.  Solutions should be proposed to assure that newbies receive an adequate training and how to better monitor their participation.  As coordinators of the response, we dont know where from the newbies come from. Are they simply coming and select a task or participate to a mapathon ? This is hard to say. 

Mapathons might be the solution to better supervise newbies participation.  But this only if the mapathons organizers accept the responsability to provide high quality data for their group, to offer more training and assure more monitoring of their participants.
regard

 
Pierre 
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