[Talk-GB] planned Mapillary initiative on solar panel pics

[Dan S]

Hi all,

I'm working with some nonprofits (Open Climate Fix & Possible) who are
interested in running a campaign to get more UK solar panels into OSM
this year. As before, the goal here is solar panels, not general
mapping, and in particular to encourage casual users to engage and
help. So, we made a simple one-purpose app for non-OSM users to
contribute street-level photos.

The app is a simple frontend to the Mapillary API. So in summer we
expect to have a collection of geolocated photos stored in Mapillary,
from people snapping solar panels. We will then grab the photos that
are specifically associated with our initiative, and put them on the
map. (We could simply trawl through thousands of already-existing
Mapillary photos, but that's easier said than done, I've tried it...
needle+haystack.)

The app is in the "internal testing" stage so we've taken just a
handful of photos so far. If you have comments, I'd be interested in
your opinion on how useful this will be for getting more sampling of
the "long tail" of unmapped solar panels into OSM.

(The photos go into this mapillary account [or into a user's own
account, if they register with mapillary]:
https://www.mapillary.com/app/stats/?user=solaruploads
though the interface isn't really designed for browsing a sprinkling
of single-shot photos, so that link might not be too helpful
directly.)

Best
Dan