Deja Vu, again :)

This is now the 3rd annual instalment of a crazy naval-gaze about my mapping. Blame it on whoever called this part of the osm space a diary. If there is a chance to speak about my personal reflections I’m grabbing it. And what better time of year than now, since I see other people reflecting and goal setting.

My Targets

I wrote about measuring my own commitment to mapping in 2019 and then again in 2020 for the years ahead. It was fun to see my objectives shift around and good for me to test myself against them. In 2020’s diary I then had to be like the Roman God Janus; to look to the previous year by way of review, and to the coming year by way of promising some targets.

My Hot Spot

Last year I undertook to have my hot spots look less like the measles and more like a large boil, and for that boil to be in Ireland. This is definitely the case now, as the graphic shows (use the slider to see the expansion of mapping in Ireland). Having achieved this I’m not concerned with continuing to make a target for this in 2021.

My Ireland Contribution Rank

Again, the target was to stay in the top 10 mappers in Ireland. It was sustained in 2020, but there was one occasion in July where I dropped out of the top 10. I am presently the 5th biggest, without too much effort. Since I technically didn’t keep this one I will go forward with it and try to stay in the top 10 in 2021.

In the past year I realised that Pascal Neis’s “Ireland” is in fact only the Republic of Ireland. A lot of my mapping is in Northern Ireland, and as a consequence shows up in the UK. This about 20% of my present mapping.

As an extra kick I’m going to try to develop a tool that shows all the mapping on the whole island of Ireland, and this itself can be a target since it would be of benefit to everyone involved in mapping Ireland.

Map on the move

… See full entry

Background

The following assertion was made by a blogger around 18 months ago:

"..mappers as a whole are mapping more features (buildings, houses, libraries, schools, green spaces etc) within the wealthier areas of the Dublin region than in the poorer areas." {53degrees} 

It was made here and in a follow up here

Reading the two posts together with the twitter promotions for them it is clear that the hypothesis rests on the perception that OSM contributors, specifically those contributing to OSM around Dublin, suffer from some kind of collective unconscious bias, to the extent that they have neglected the deprived areas of Dublin and mapped the affluent areas to a higher level of completion. This assertion, if well founded, would reveal that not only does the map of Ireland, specifically Dublin have gaps, - but that these gaps are patterned in such a way as to further exclude and marginalise the residents of these areas and the second blogpost makes no doubt of this consequence.

We have a great name for the band!: "The Spurious Correlations"

The author refers to 3 or 4 examples of poor areas, sparsely mapped, compared in turn to affluent areas mapped to a higher extent using visual assessment. There is no transparent methodology or apparent logic for these comparisons other than they were what the author appears to want to choose. Perhaps they are conveniently selected to suit the conclusion.

The author repeated the claim on twitter [now deleted] on the 23rd October 2020, presenting the evidence of these three or four comparisons as conclusive proof of a “startling lack of completion of working class areas in osm, a citizen science project”. Some charts were shown, demonstrating a very selective method of counting tags. Whether this represents traces of a deeper investigation remains unclear. This needs to be tested here and now.

Transparent Method

… See full entry

This is a fright that turned to fun.

In my morning walk today I travelled along Shanowen Grove, and I took StreetComplete with me, adding building levels, addresses, building types and so on. On the last section of road I discovered one of the buildings to appear on StreetComplete as a tower.

Posting in the #osmIRL Telegram group I shared the screenshot. Dónal came to my rescue It turns out the building was specified to have 21 levels. Looking at the object history on JOSM later it turns out the levels were set by Tshedy see here. However, knowing Tshedy’s level of accuracy and the likelihood that “21” is a typo that was intended to be a “2”. This is very much in keeping with a similar “small”(but big) error in Melbourne.

StreetComplete is a great tool, especially where the basic building objects have been mapped, in a slow stroll along a street one can add serious detail, and the better the initial mapping the easier it is to see which objects require further details.

OpenStreetMap in Ireland has launched a project for National Heritage Week 2020, with some preparatory work now underway by the community. A town was chosen, deliberately large to have a decent number of heritage sites, historic buildings and well documented past celebrities and people of repute, and so we arrived at Clonmel.

There is a bit of a plan in place, set out here on the project wiki. The first step was to set down a base map, with the roads, street layouts, landuses and as many buildings as possible traced off Bing. This got done here with 176 squares mapped and validated in just 3 days by the community! The Power of the crowd……

The next part was to do some mapillary, to harvest as much about missing streetnames, building names and details as possible. This was done on a joint visit with Annekaro a.k.a b-unicycling. Admitedly what was captured is about 20% to 30% of the area of the town. So perhaps more is needed and hopefully Waterford Dave’s tweet will rescue a few more of the missing details ;)

The next phases are probably a more advanced population of building detail, and way more pin mapping. It is hoped that by liaising with locals on the ground we can activate more new users and make the project more visible, especially the benefits #OpenStreetMap offer to community based heritage mapping.

View Larger Map

In my professional life I have been on radio a whole bunch of times, and on TV a couple of times. My mother used to say I had a face for radio ;) .. but I am experienced enough at this point to handle most media. For the first time ever I was involved in a podcast, and I was super glad that it was the new osm related podcast, “ways and nodes” which is done by Austin Bell who is known as itsamap! and maps a whole lot around South Carolina, in the USA.

The podcast is right here so listen and enjoy.

I learned a lot observing and listening to Austin. He hangs out beforehand and develops his questions by talking to you, and it was great that we mapped together beforehand looking at the same stuff on the map of Ireland. There was a bit of a theme about migration. By the end of the podcast he was determined to map based on his own family’s historical origins in Scotland.

You can get in touch with Austin by simply mailing him austin@nodesandways.com and look at this mapping account here I think it is important that osm has a regular podcast, and Austin gives up a lot of time he could use mapping to make these episodes.

This is a about what I have learned most recently by being involved as a contributor to, and organiser of the “mapping sprint” or “mapathon” called #StayHomeAndMapIRL.This is written in my own voice as an individual mapper.

The mapping sprint was a week long, and really grew out of a spontaneous confluence of two things:

• The mapping campaign #osmIRL_buildings for which we use a task manager

• The necessity of everyone in Ireland to stay home, as part of the Covid-19 emergency

By combining these two we were creating an immediacy and dot-joining exercise between something people were all experiencing, and something useful to do with the time at home.

Our community agreed at the 2019 AGM to have a mapping task, one where participation was voluntary like always, but it would be the “common ground” for mappers. Some deep thought went into choosing buildings as the focus, not least being that openstreetmap for Ireland seems to lag behind in the completeness of the buildings. Typically, a large Irish town or city could have a small number of buildings mapped, even in the town centres, almost as if buildings were not a significant human feature and not a major part of the detail of any map at the end-user scale. Of course the wider point is that working at this scale adding a feature like buildings allows our community to scale up and down, and by that I mean add useful end user things like details about the buildings, or scale up and create better de facto landuses - ultimately to increase the completeness and usefulness of the map.

The week through insights taught me the following things:

… See full entry

My Promised Targets

Last year I set down my mapping new years’ resolutions well before January. So wouldn’t it be fun, and also embarressing :) to review these and see if I had the year I hoped to have. My diary entry a year ago is here. Set out the various targets.

My Hot-Spot

I wanted my heat map to shift to Ireland. While it is true that I developed a number of heatmap centres in Ireland, I achieved these by following the dispersed regional community initiatives (remote tasks and face to face meetups) set by #osmIRL. This meant that I didn’t have a particular area into which the aggregate effect of highly intense mapping could be channeled. So my big heatmap remains in Lesotho, and because it built up over 4 years it may stay that way for a while. However, considering I wouldn’t have made my largest hot-spot shift anyway, I regard the case of measles I have caused on the linked map to be a success.

My Ireland Rank

Next, I want to maintain a top 10 place in the Ireland 2 monthly contributor list. I was able to do this exept for twice, as in June I fell to 20th and in August I was 25th. This was caused by a lovely summer where I went outdoors a bit more plus my old trusty laptop had some issues and I couldn’t afford to replace it immediately. I have learned that to stay on top (top10) in Ireland one can have 2 week breaks, but no longer. In 2020 I will not have breaks longer than 2 weeks.

Map on the move

I wanted to hit the Mapillary millionare status by the end of January, and then I wanted my total in Ireland to hit 1 million by the end of June. I comfortably made it with both these, and my Mapillary is now 1,292,702, and I don’t want to set more targets here, except to capture images where osmIRL needs them most of all.

Mapping Gaps

… See full entry

I was at the #osmIRL and #digitalNewry meetup yesterday.

It is wonderful to see the people of a town coming together and speaking about the challenges they have in situ, boundaries, licences, old buildings clumped together in their town core. There was a diversity of interests, yet a common idea that getting Newry more mapped than it presently is.

Newry still misses a lot of details on buildings

I used to live in Belfast, for around 5 months in 1995. I went there to do a piece of research, some of which was ethnographic, and the rest of it was a few visits to the Northern Ireland Statistics Office. It was an amazing time for that city in terms of peace breaking out, and a City literally stretching with a sigh of relief. And it was an honour to be there at that time. Since my return to Dublin, I only went back three times. Which is very little for a place that I felt very much at home in.

Heading up with my mapping buddies Lineo and Tad we talked about how streetsigns and road markings have subtile differences across the now infamous brexit hard/soft border.

Lineo compared the border to that between Lesotho and South Africa, while Tad resolved to come back this way on his motorbike and capture as much imagery as possible while it remains open.

… See full entry

Setting Goals for DeBigC’s mapping

In the year ahead I want my mapping to be more strategic and pointed. I have set the following goals, to assist it in achieving this. These goals will be hard to achieve in total, but if the majority of them are, I will be very happy since they will mean I am moving towards my goals. I am a board member of OSM Ireland CLG LTD, so just for clarity sake these goals are nothing to do with any position taken by the board or on behalf of the community.

My Hot-Spot

Firstly, I want my heat map to shift to Ireland. I have been a large #MapLesotho contributor, but for my own reasons I want to map Ireland much more. At the moment the largest concentration of my nodes is Lesotho as shown on this heatmap

My Ireland Rank

Next, I want to maintain a top 10 place in the Ireland 2 monthly contributor list. I’m all for other power mappers flexing their muscles, so this is a relative target to whatever they contribute, I will stay up with them.

Map on the move

Ireland doesn’t have a “millionaire” Mapillary user, and there are more than 50 of these worldwide. My target has three aspects,starting with me reaching 1 million images by the end of January 2019 (right now I’m on 913k). I want my Irish image haul to reach 1 million by June 1st.

Mapping Gaps

Regarding my own contributions Dublin is priority. For some reason large parts of North Dublin are not well mapped, with some exceptions like Castleknock and Clontarf, due to the stewardship of large locally focussed mappers. However, there are huge swathes of urban Dublin barely mapped at all aside from landuse and road networks. I’m aiming to map Coolock, Raheny, Drumcondra, Beaumont much more than they are done, to the point where all the buildings in these areas are complete.

I was asked to do a workshop on mapillary yesterday by the OSM community.

I delivered some slides to kick off. These are here I was focussed on discussing how best to manage the mapillary app on an android device.

At the end of the talk we went walking after breaking into groups of 2 and heading out with our phones held high. We decided simply to walk around the blackpitts area of Dublin and capture some of the uncovered areas. In general main roads in Dublin have a high chance of some coverage, but when you look at side streets and a lot of residential roads there simply isn’t the same level of coverage.

… See full entry

At the end of 2017 I was the biggest Mapillary contributor in Ireland, without really trying too hard and just using a front facing Samsung camera in my car and short diversions on the commute to and from work.

At some point around March 2018 my good buddy and OSM Ireland contributor Dave jumped ahead by about ten thousand images. I made a solemn (ahem… competitive, but sporting) promise/threat to get working on closing the Mapillary gap from me to him. I know, this sounds like General Buck Turgidson from the movie Dr. Strangelove….

… See full entry

Martin Dittus normally does this sort of analysis!

Just looking at our present counts of everything in #MapLesotho

We count nodes being created, edited and deleted. We have set up the count to feed out of the osm database, so anyone working within the polygon of Lesotho is picked up. Of course GeoFabrick only gave Lesotho “spatial sovereignty” in February 2015, so we have a year and a half of editing to look at here. This shows 824 people involved.

I like to cut off at 100 mappers. When you do that you see that the top 100 have done 97% of the mapping. The remaining mappers listed tend to have very modest contributions to #MapLesotho. The modal value of nodes is in fact 1. I have no idea what causes this, but when I click into their usernames I tend to see a mixture of once-off mapping, dormant accounts, while others are do appear to be active. Indeed, there are even some that I see involved in other HOTOSM and missing maps tasks. So regarding humanitarian mapping I guess #MapLesotho is like a holiday resort, a bit of a hotel to park your single node. And its not a high priority task, so that’s ok isn’t it…?

Between 50 and 100 is an interesting space. Most of the mappers here I have met and taught to map. They are mostly Irish schoolkids from Portmarnock or Basotho Planners. Mapping didn’t really grab this group as their favourite activity, of course they can have up to 10 mapping days and over 10,000 nodes. But those that are not new are attenders, they sit back… others will organise the Mapathons. Others will map alone. They feel safe in the big group and have mainly helped the mapping by making the feeling of a flock. But when we get to the 50th mapper mark we still have have 94% of the mapping done by those above.

… See full entry

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

… See full entry

I have been intensively mapping for over two years now, most of that obviously connected to the #MapLesotho project. I had an older account which I handed over to my son to do a Geography project, and he never returned it !

GIS to Potlatch

When I started OSM mapping I had a good deal of experience of GIS (15 years!), and was well used to the simple “drawing and editing” tools in MapInfo and ArcView for example. When I started using OSM I was using Potlach and while it seemed to close down a lot I eventually got the hang of it and started marking in walkways that other mappers in Ireland seemed to miss. The main thing I did was apply location point tags to things, not knowing that because I opened it in Internet Explorer that Potlatch was unavoidable….. still and all, I had things to map and mapped them.

Potlatch to ID Editor

Summary: a breath of fresh air!! Should I say more? Some quirks exist acknowledged here. And a whole lot of other things happen people depending on their quality of internet connect and state of health of their machine…. just like all the other editors “shit happens”. I managed to rack up something like 750,000* quality nodes in Lesotho with ID, which I think shows that there are misnomers about speed, and different editors suit different people. In being co-ordinator for #MapLesotho in Fingal I was aware that all browser based editors can waste internet connectivity, which is gold in Africa. However, having roots in GIS I am used to a little Cartographic rendering, a little styling, and a little of what educationalists call “visual grammer”. ID cannot be faulted for its simple, tactile style.

ID Editor to JOSM

… See full entry

I am in Maseru to train 14 members of the #MapLesotho OSM community. This is the third, and final year of the training. That is explained here here

So far the community members have decided that they will form three clusters of interest, and these are:

• Training and Engagement - main mission, to make Lesotho be as mapped as it possibly can be, and ensure that lots of users are recruited and make a contribution to the map

• Technical Quality - ensure all that is mapped is traced and tagged in an orthodox way to increase usability of the map

• Spatial Analysis - will use the data as much as possible to investigate matters relating to the physical layout of Lesotho.

I will be sad to leave, but to see the OSM community become so focussed here is a wonderful thing for me, knowing that in some small way I helped it. Right now the guys here have the basemap for the whole urban area 1% from completion and 2% away from validation.

… See full entry

123

I don’t write these often enough, but with the last few joules of energy I have before sleep I thought I would write something about #MapLesotho.

I am visiting Lesotho in February, most likely for the last time as the agreement (memorandum) expires between Fingal County Council and the Ministry for Local Government. We were never going to get a fully loaded map done with just 24 months and three visits.

However, we leave behind a one million node mapper in Tshedy. We also have six 250,000 node mappers. We also leave Lesotho in the condition of being one of the “least mapped” countries in 2013, to Africa’s most mapped nation, now beating countries that are higher on the development indices. But that’s not good enough.

By the end of February a small team of four will start to analyse all this data and use QGIS to increase the use case of OSM over incomplete and licenced data. They will do this to answer real questions and come up with real solutions in managing Lesotho’s environment. Another team of four will be custodians of a server, and employ error fixing tools and mind new mapping tasks from a technical standpoint. A third team will be beefed up with a train-the-trainer using LEARNOSM and ID/JOSM manuals. to create more mappers.

Is this the perfect storm of making Lesotho the most mapped, most geodata focussed, most evidence driven country in Africa. Probably not. There are associated projects, like the creation of a Planning Institute which is independent of Government. And there is is broad understanding of NGOs working in the country, chief among them Action Ireland Trust who are logistical users of the mapping.

We have a lot to do to prepare for February. Wish us luck, but more important than that wish the burgeoning new community of #MapLesotho well, and support and engage with them..

Having worked with individual planners in Lesotho to map the country in February, and with work continuing very gradually ever since we now have the towns of Mafeteng, Qacha’s Nek and Hlotse finished or close to being finished. The vast bulk of the rest of the country remains unmapped other than the national highways and the tourist spots.

MapLesotho is now a big push to crowdsource in the extra help needed to create a decent basemap of the Kingdom. It takes place on July 25th 2014.

Fingal County Council and The Kingdom of Lesotho have a memorandum of understanding which seeks to improve the profession of Planning in both territories. As part of an evolving relationship there is work underway to impove the spatial data analysis capacity of the Lesothan planners.

Given various considerations about this including cost, adaptability and sustainability mean that stimulating the (underpopulated) potential of Open Street Map is an important step. Planners themselves will get involved in populating OSM and will get involved in seeking others to do so. The ultimate objective would be to have a sufficient OSM community in Lesotho to sustain a detailed resource, free and available to all from which Planners can work optimally to create an evidence based decision making culture within their profession and system.

Planners require OSM projects for the areas in which they are most familiar. These initial areas are (subject to expansion):

town (district)

Maseru City and suburbs (Maseru)

Ha Foso (Berea)

Hlotse (Leribe)

Mafeteng (Mafeteng)

Qacha’s Nek (Qacha’s Nek)