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

[Pierre Béland]

Thanks Franz-Josef
We started  a new project to both redress the Quality of the data for Butembo and to add new buildings with the rapid growth of this city population (more then 3% per year). Thanks to USAID who provided a recent imagery who shows a lot more buildings.  This information is important to evaluate the population of the city for vaccination campaigns. The last census was 10 years ago.
https://tasks.hotosm.org/project/5601

With the extent of the quality problems from Newbies participation, we have to reserve this project to experienced contributors preferably using JOSM and that know how to adjust offset of imageries.  Validating first contributions to project 5601 this morning, we observed that it is going very well and we just need more contributors :)  Let's keep it motivating for experienced mappers to Respond to such humanitarian emergencies while solutions are looked at to better integrate Newbies in such projects.  This first project to redress the data exclude hills where different offsets are observed for the imagery. We will add distinct projects for these areas.

Analysis of Newbies contribution

The OSM-DRC coordination team with Claire Halleux, Fred Moine and myself, we have followed closely the tasking manager projects 5485, 5487 and 5585 now archived. Looking at the map, It was easy to observe that Tracing of buildings was very inadequate, everywhere, and statistics did show a rapid growth of errors  with the participation of newbies. Restricting projects to experienced mappers, we could confirm that exclusion of Newbies was drastically reducing errors. This Butembo OSM Map extract on twitter shows Quality problems that we find everywhere around Butembo with sometimes 2-3-4 overlap buildings and overlaps over roads.
https://twitter.com/pierzen/status/1072282951210147840

For many of us, it was motivating to start to participate to OSM while mapping for major humanitarian responses. At first the ratio of newbies / Experienced mappers did let progress smoothly. But with media coverage of such OSM humanitarian responses, more and more newbies have come.  The Tasking manager and the organisation of Mapathons greatly contributed to escalate the number of participants.  Now let's say that this is time to escalate the Quality too.
The errors observed seem to confirm that Newbies have easy access to OSM editors and start to edit without any knowledge, no training and monitoring. Do Mapathons can redress this situation or do they let contributors map without any training and monitoring ? We have to assure that Mapathons organizers play a role, take the responsability to produce Quality data, to train and monitor Newbies mapping, to assure that they trace regular buildings (not fantasy forms we too often see) assure tracing corresponds to the outline of the buildings observed on the imagery. Sorry to say that the quality observed for Butembo is quite inappropriate to respond to this Ebola outbreak emergency. 

Let's mention that some Mapathons organizers have good procedures to train and validate data. Other organizers should follow this trend and «Live Monitoring of quality» should also be look at by the Mapathon organizers to assure to deliver Quality data at the end of a session.

Adding to that, there are hills in various parts the city and images available have various offsets in the city as compared to the Bing reference. The newbies did not align the imagery and have simply traced buildings over the roads previously traced with Bing. Trying to correct this, some inexperienced validators simply started to realign the roads with the imagery used for projects 5485, 5487 and 5585.

In the meantime, we have no other choice for this Nord Kivu Ebola Activation to restrict mapping to experienced mappers. 

regard
 
Pierre 
 

    Le vendredi 7 décembre 2018 01 h 49 min 03 s HNE, Franz-Josef Behr <franz-josef.behr at hft-stuttgart.de> a écrit :  
 
  
Very interesting findings and recommendations, Pierre!
 
I find it very useful to have some numbers like that, not only vague recommendations regarding education.
 
Best regards - Franz-Josef
  
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