[Osmf-talk] Africa as a training ground was RE: google Open Buildings usage request

Sun Aug 1 17:48:25 UTC 2021

Hi everyone,

Interesting discussion here, seeing that it grew out of RE: Google Open
Buildings usage request and has turned into a discussion of HOT projects.

I think the solution to all this is having strong local OSM communities who
take ownership of OpenStreetMap in their countries. Communities who can
raise the resources they need to train their members and coordinate mapping
activities. That is exactly what we have been doing in Uganda, and for
someone to come out and claim that the local community here is ruled by HOT
is an insult and a lack of acknowledgment of all the good work we have done
over the years by the members of the OSM community in Uganda.

The HOT Tasking manager is a tool, which many organizations including local
OSM communities in Africa are using to coordinate their mapping. Not all
the projects on the HOT Tasking Manager are set up and managed by HOT. It
is just a tool that different communities make use of to coordinate their
mapping.

Many of the individuals mapping using the HOT Tasking Manager are actually
locals in those countries. In Uganda, the local OSM community here has been
mapping Uganda's new cities, and all the border towns across the country
using the HOT Tasking Manager, in a coordinated way where projects are
mapped and validated to clean up the data.

One last point I want to make is that you will not see many responses here,
from African mappers, simply because not many of them are on the membership
mailing list, but also because they prefer to use different channels to
communicate including Telegram, WhatsApp, and Facebook groups, maybe its
worth seeking their point of view on this topic on those channels as well.

Kind regards,
Geoffrey

Member of the OSM Community in Uganda.

On Sun, Aug 1, 2021 at 6:51 PM Bert -Araali- Van Opstal <
bert.araali.afritastic at gmail.com> wrote:

> I am from Uganda and also mapped in South Sudan, Kenya, Tanzania and the
> DRC.
>
> The situation here is described well and is even worse, yet nothing has
> improved over the years, the opposite, it has worsened.
> It has to be described in the correct context though. Before we had HOT
> projects here, there was hardly any mapping in Africa, still today, it will
> be hard to find any very active local mappers not involved in the "HOT
> building mapping projects for beginners".
>
> HOT does not only dominate the mapping activities, it does also rule the
> local chapters. Local chapters are registered by HOT payed members, local
> chapter members are all HOT volunteers, naturally, focusing and organising
> events to support HOT projects only.
> The core issue: lack of resources, financial means. HOT was helpful in the
> past, providing means, including financial facilitation and IT resources,
> but has become more and more a vehicle to support it's ever growing
> organisation and overhead. It has become more and more dependent on
> powerful corporate financiers, ESRI, Facebook etc... alike, using non open
> source tools and corporate non open source resources which reveal or
> violate the privacy of OSM members. Well beyond and contradicting to the
> free and open source philosophy of OSM.
> Over time, the issue has grown due to the sheer extend of their projects,
> not only in bb size, but also in the number of changes. A local mapper or
> organisation, without financial support, can hardly compete with thousands
> of low quality edits and damage on a daily basis.
>
> My experience with HOT has been positive in the way that I tried to
> establish some "HOT independent" local guideline activities. After some
> initial interest, mostly from HOT volunteers, it has stranded, due to lack
> of active participants willing and able to deviate from the HOT interests.
> That is a normal reaction though, if you lack even the basic resources
> like a laptop, affordable internet or a basic income to support these, you
> can't do much. When you get facilitation, for those lucky ones it's a means
> of income, not volunteering. Competing with volunteers from across the
> world who do have those means, feeling sorry for the poor African and
> jumping in, with good intentions, but actually hindering the local
> communities in getting a durable solution and access to resources.
>
> Compare it with the aid for healthcare, education etc... . You don't solve
> these by financing projects and sending health specialists or teachers
> ("HOT humanitarian managers" or the few "OSM specialists" among them) from
> more prosperous regions. Engagement, training, management by locals,
> supported in every way, even as a basic income, is a possible outcome. HOT
> tried this, hardly succeeded, local project managers, volunteers, rarely
> respond to any comments outside the HOT environment, let alone are willing
> to follow advise or guidelines not created by HOT. Again, understandable
> due to their financial dependencies, intention to slavishly follow whatever
> HOT management or board decides, to support HOT's projects since they
> provide the financing. Remain non-creative and innovative mapping thousands
> of simple building outlines and roads and deleting anything you come along
> which I was not trained for by HOT or unfamiliar with.
> We are in a vicious circle here, one which HOT can break by changing it's
> policies, or which we as a global OSM community no longer accept, act
> against, as a protection and a means of inclusion for the less fortunate
> among our communities and adhering to our initial goals and code of conduct.
>
> The Africa highway tagging is a result of and created by HOT. It even has
> a request on the page not to edit it's contents without consulting HOT. Not
> that it is bad, at least it is something we can use as a guidance. But it
> is not a result from a true local African community.
>
> Greetings,
>
> Bert Araali
> On 01/08/2021 17:09, Heather Leson wrote:
>
> HI folks,
>
> just wondering if someone who is from Africa (one of the ~54 countries) is
> responding here.
>
> Thanks
>
> Heather
>
>
> Heather Leson
> heatherleson at gmail.com
> Twitter/skype: HeatherLeson
> Blog: textontechs.com
>
>
> On Sun, Aug 1, 2021 at 3:37 PM John Whelan <jwhelan0112 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Some parts of Africa do have a survey department and some do not.  It
>> might be an idea to document those that do.
>>
>> The African highway wiki page might be the place to do it.
>>
>> I'm beginning to suspect we need a new rule on highway classification
>> changes in Africa, don't do it unless you're local.  I tend to use
>> unclassified to connect settlements occasionally I'll go as high as
>> tertiary.
>>
>> I have concerns about projects mapping buildings.  I come across
>> settlements where half the buildings are mapped and nothing has been done
>> for a year or two.  It doesn't help that much when you try to use the
>> number of buildings to estimate the population.
>>
>> I also have major concerns about highways being deleted.  They aren't
>> easy to spot though.  We need some sort of tool?
>>
>> Having said that HOT has added a number of tools to OSM.  The first is
>> the task manager.  Locally in Canada it's been used for imports etc.
>>
>> New mappers are fine with the right tools in their hands.
>>
>> We had a mapathon organised to map buildings in in Edmonton.  The
>> buildings added were of a poor enough quality to create comments on the
>> local email list.  Out of curiosity I got involved with another mapathon,
>> we had a poorer turnout but I only gave them JOSM and the buildings_tool.
>> With half the number of mappers over two hours we managed to map twice as
>> many buildings, some mappers for some odd shapes drew two rectangles then
>> joined them. Either HOT needs to use JOSM and the buildings_tools plugin or
>> it desperately needs a buildings_tools something in iD.
>>
>> To help with validation there is SelectduplicateBuildings.js I've deleted
>> a few thousand duplicates using the todo list.
>>
>> I wanted to import the local bus stops in Ottawa.  There isn't any
>> practical way to map them otherwise.  If you have all the bus stops in the
>> system great, if you only have a few it really doesn't work for route
>> planning.
>>
>> Somehow I got invited to a meeting with the Canadian Minister responsible
>> for Open Data at which I identified we couldn't use their Open Data because
>> of the license.  A few years later we got a new license which has been
>> blessed by OSM's Legal Working Group.
>>
>> The City of Ottawa was kind enough to adopt the same license so now I
>> have my bus stops.
>>
>> Treasury Board are now working with a number of African countries to make
>> their data available under the same license.  What sort of Open Data data
>> license does Zambia have?
>>
>> My understanding is it was the result of a HOT project that decided Maxar
>> to make their imagery available to OSM.
>>
>> HOT aren't the only problem, I've seen dubious edits by Apple etc.
>>
>> HOT are improving, their projects now tend to map only simple things.
>> Their instructions are improving, their work on validation is getting
>> better.   You now need to have a bit of experience before you are allowed
>> to validate.
>>
>> On balance I think that HOT adds value to Africa.  Ideally all mapping
>> would be done by experienced local mappers with ten years experience but
>> unfortunately they aren't enough of them in Africa unlike say Germany.
>>
>> I think what we do need is better work flows for Africa.  There are
>> plenty of smartphones around which are quite capable of adding detail such
>> as village names etc.  What we don't have is a set of simple instructions
>> on how to do it.
>>
>> There is also an education problem in parts of Africa.  To be able to
>> follow instructions you need to be able to read.
>>
>> These things are all interrelated and it isn't black and white.
>>
>> Cheerio John
>>
>> dfjkman at gmail.com wrote on 8/1/2021 2:12 AM:
>>
>> Hi Shawn,
>>
>> One of the problems is the number of projects on the go at any one time,
>> Africa has more HOT projects on the go than the rest of the world put
>> together, many of them overlap and many of them die a natural death without
>> ever being validated leaving a great deal of mess behind. Many of the HOT
>> mappers are new to OSM and the same few validators tend to be spread over
>> many projects and even they may not know what they are looking at in the
>> satellite imagery, I suspect they also get overwhelmed with the amount of
>> corrections they have to make. I have been in contact with the leads of some
>> of these projects and they have responded well to any advice I have given.
>> Some of the validators also respond well others just move off to other
>> projects. The real problem comes where you have a particular mapper who is
>> unwilling to take the advice given and continues to make the same errors
>> over and over. Worse still they tell you they are doing it for the good of
>> the country so development decisions can be made. The assumption being that
>> Zambia does not have a survey department and is unable to produce their own
>> official ordinance survey maps, something they have been doing for over 50
>> years.
>>
>> Then you get projects that come through and make changes to major road
>> classifications, remove roads that do not appear in imagery but have been
>> mapped by a local mapper and change classifications. After you make
>> corrections the whole thing kicks off again with the next project that comes
>> through with a new hashtag. Sort of like a 'Mad Max' movie. As a local
>> mapper you either run around trying to fix the errors or slink off to some
>> far flung corner and map in peace.
>>
>> That being said interpreting imagery in Africa is not easy, particularly in
>> Zambia as it is highly seasonal, what may appear to be a track in one image
>> may appear as a path in another particularly if the image was taken towards
>> the wet season and everything is greening up and vegetation is encroaching
>> on to the track. Whole well defined roads or tracks may disappear under a
>> tree canopy and what once appeared to be nothing but scrub now looks like a
>> well wooded area. Zambia in particular has a seasonal wetland feature that
>> during the rains resembles a wet meadow and in the dry season, when most
>> imagery is taken, resembles a grassland and may even appear black once it
>> has burnt with wild fires. Some of these 'dambos' will have a temporary pool
>> of water at the lowest point known as a pan. Some will have an ephemeral
>> steam that runs through the centre of them while with another the stream
>> runs to one side of it or there is no stream at all, in the dry season the
>> stream bed may be used as a track, I have often come across these dry stream
>> beds mapped as tracks. A small collection of buildings does not necessarily
>> imply a village but is more likely a small family farm. All this makes
>> Africa not the ideal place for a beginner mapper. It is not a given that a
>> local mapper in one part of Africa will recognise all features in another
>> part of Africa either.
>>
>> Dave
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Shawn K. Quinn <skquinn at rushpost.com> <skquinn at rushpost.com>
>> Sent: 31 July 2021 08:42
>> To: osmf-talk at openstreetmap.org
>> Subject: Re: [Osmf-talk] google Open Buildings usage request
>>
>> On 7/31/21 01:25, dfjkman at gmail.com wrote:
>>
>> Another point is touched upon by Craig, 'If the same thing had
>> happened in Germany there would have been a riot on this channel'.
>> Africa is treated as the training ground for new mappers, this is all
>> well and good, new mappers are welcome and needed, but the large areas
>> they map and errors introduced are many and varied and can take
>> considerable time and effort to correct and as a result nobody
>> bothers. Nobody actually asks the Africans what they want or whether
>> they mind this mess being created in their backyard, judging by the
>> response to this thread they don't want it. No wonder many in Africa feel
>>
>> they are just the guineapigs for the rest of the world.
>>
>> This concerns me. Both the use of Africa as a training ground without any
>> input from the residents, and the apparent lack of a real, proper training
>> ground for new mappers. While we do have a sandbox, apparently either the
>> new mappers don't know about it or it doesn't fit the needs for practice of
>> mapping new features.
>>
>> At the very least, we should be practicing the ethic "if you wouldn't want
>> someone mapping like that in your city, don't map like that in Africa (or
>> wherever)". Basically, it's a variant of the golden rule.
>>
>> Thoughts?
>>
>> --
>> Shawn K. Quinn <skquinn at rushpost.com> <skquinn at rushpost.com>http://www.rantroulette.comhttp://www.skqrecordquest.com
>>
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