MapLesotho Month

It has been blogged about and tweeted to death. The summary is a modem, with a month’s unliited credit heading around the Mountain Kingdom stopping at 12 venues and allowing 80 people to map.

Why a modem

Why was it needed? Because people in Lesotho have peculiar attitudes to the internet. That is a mixture of awe and myth, with generally a pessimistic view of the chances that it wont crash, or isn’t for them to use, or costs too much. Of course more than half of Lesotho’s population is carrying a smartphone, which is of course a million possibilities to connect to the worldwide web and there is wifi in each district somewhere if you root around. But the modem gave everybody comfort.

Cynicism

Some of the mappers with us started in 2014 have left the cause. Most people that we show how to map don’t do it with regularity. In fact more than 50% don’t even map at all. Over the years we figured out that we needed to share the “vision”, and also explain what could be possible with all that spatial data. And sadly a lot of the people we met back at the start say, “are you still doing that?… that map you are making….” It can be very easy to get disheartened by the cynicism, skepticism and misinformation about what #MapLesotho is. Of course we can ignore that the creation of #MapLesotho has helped a shift in statutory control of mapping to a different agency within the Kingdom. Or that Lesotho is world famous for its growing openstreetmap richness.

The First Mapping Minister?

At the end of the final day of the aforementioned month an unannounced visit by a Minister bristling to show off that she can map, having learned it from Colin McAndrew on a visit to Dublin. Is that the first Government Minister to use openstreetmap? Maybe not, but it sure as heck helped a lot.

The Future

When all is said and done. #MapLesotho is a genie that has got out of its lamp. No amount of cynicism can delete the spatial data on the database. The persons mapping today could change. The co-ordination of the project could change. That will not weaken in any way the potential and enormity of 12 million nodes that capture every building, every ploughed field, every road junction and mountain stream.