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Microtasking from Disaster Mappers - help needed

Posted by pedrito1414 on 17 July 2015 in English. Last updated on 3 August 2015.

As part of the planning for mapping South Kivu, the Disaster Mappers (and particularly a guy called Benni) have been developing a new microtasking platform for identifying human settlements and road networks before we go anywhere near the tasking manager.

This has been designed for two reasons. Firstly, so mappers don’t have to spend hours scanning through the many, many, many square kilometres of jungle that exist in the province. The second is that, by using a much simpler tool for recognition of features, we hope to be able to engage a whole new audience of collaborators. People that might not want to learn iD - or might only have five minutes to spend. If they can do this painstaking work in a relatively easy (and fun?) way, it leaves mappers to… well, map.

Benni’s first try at this was great, but we knew it could be better. We sent it out to the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team list and got some great feedback.

screenshot of the v2 pybossa microtasking platform

Now there is a version 2. Benni says he has taken this about as far as his skills allow and is asking for help to finish it off. If anyone is interested in collaborating on this, please get in touch by leaving a comment or by tweeting at Missing Maps.

Benni has left some comments on what he has done and the challenges he needs help solving on the original feedback form. Source code available via dropbox, here or on github, here.

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Discussion

Comment from DaCor on 19 July 2015 at 10:23

This is great, a guy in IRC, POVaddict was his name I think, did something like this previously for Mali mapping or DRC mapping about 1-2 years ago. Covered a massive area in a very short period.

I did a blast of tiles but one thing I noticed, the controls say you can zoom/move the imagery but I didnt find this to be the case, rather it was just static images. Its not an issue if thats what they are supposed to be, but maybe remove that instruction if thats the case as it could lead to confusion / frustration for others

Comment from pedrito1414 on 20 July 2015 at 08:58

Thanks Dave, the guy that coded it has reached the limit of his skills, so he’s looking for someone who can help him with the bugs!

By the way, if you double click, you can pan / zoom…

P

Comment from Mateusz Konieczny on 22 July 2015 at 11:20

Source code available via dropbox, here.

I would strongly recommend using git repository for code. There is available an excellent free hosting of git repositories in Github, Bitbucket and other sites.

Comment from joost schouppe on 22 July 2015 at 14:19

This is very cool. Mapazonia might be interested too.

It might be interesting to differentiate between settlements, roads and rivers. To keep things speedy, you could have four buttons to replace the “yes” (with all of them linking to the next picture): “settlement”, “road”, “river”, “more than one of the above” For areas already kind-of-mapped, it would be nice to have an overlay of mapped things, and be able to give feedback on map completeness.

Comment from pedrito1414 on 30 July 2015 at 11:16

Hi all, Benni has added this to github now: https://github.com/Hagellach37/pybossa_missingmaps

Cheers,

Pete

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