[Talk-se] Mapathon in Göteborg, Sweden

[Martin Holmgren]

Hi Daiva!

I wish I could have joined you on the 29th, but unfortunately I can’t.

I did, however, arrange a mapping party back in 2012 where i introduced some 10-15 persons from my private and professional networks to mapping in OSM. I thought I’d share how I did it:

First I gave an introduction to OpenStreetMap and the Humanitarian OpenStreetmapTeam using this Prezi (unfortunately in Swedish only) available for reuse/remix as CC-BY-SA 3.0:

http://prezi.com/adouopsttnuo/

The idea was to teach the group to trace buildings in Padang, based on a task issued by the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team. The reason for this was that tracing buildings (with its simple tagging and no complicated topology) is a task well suited for OSM newbies. The task we worked on was completed way back, but you can find more current tasks in the OSM Tasking Manager if you are interested in doing some humanitarian mapping at your mapathon:

http://tasks.hotosm.org

After the introduction, I just displayed a step-by-step guide on how to register at OSM.com, select an area in the Task manager for tracing, go into edit mode on OSM and then trace away. That way I was free to walk around the room and give individual guidance where needed. I felt it was pretty easy getting people up to speed with the tracing itself. You should have an even easier time with the iD editor (back then we used Potlatch). 

The only complexity that I can remember, which was specific for the task we chose, was that there was an offset in the background satellite imagery that each person had to get correctly aligned with the previously traced material before they could start adding buildings. How to do that was part of my step-by-step guide, though, so it still went fairly smooth.

So, what we did was basically armchair mapping, but a fun alternative/complement is to go out and do some surveying first and then add info to OSM based on the survey. Since Göteborg is pretty well mapped by now you would have to aim for pretty detailed information (house numbers, trees, parking spaces, sidewalks). Thanks to iD’s preset tagging at least some of this should be doable.

If you want to go for old-school surveying, you can do it on paper (http://learnosm.org/en/mobile-mapping/field-papers/). Far more elegant, and definitely something I’d recommend is to make the surveying itself a crowdsourcing activity by surveying using Mapillary. With their smartphone app, you can take sequences of street view photos that then can be used as basis for detail mapping. Mapillary is integrated into iD on OSM.com, just enable the map data layer containing the images.

Good luck with your mapathon, have fun!

Kind regards,
Martin

> 9 mars 2016 kl. 11:50 skrev Daiva Marija Brazauskaitė <brazauskaite.daiva at gmail.com>:
> 
> Hej och Hello!
> 
> my name is Daiva Brazauskaite, and I am working with student association called SKIP at University of Gothenburg (Göteborgs Universitet) in Sweden. We are organizing OSM Mapathon where we invite students and people interested in mapping to join in and learn how to use OSM. We cover basics and teach participants how to use OSM iD editor. If there are people in this group interested in joining us on 29th of March, you are more than welcome!
> 
> Also interested if any of you have tried to organize a Mapathon in Sweden and would like to know how did it go? How you advertised the event, how many people participated, what did you learn?
> 
> Are there any advises or information on event planing?
> 
> Thank you in advance!
> 
> BR,
> Daiva M. Brazauskaite
> 
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