"Field Mapping with Portable OpenStreetMap and OpenMapKit" by Emily Eros, Seth Fitzsimmons and Nicholas Hallahan.
   Live captioning by Norma Miller.
   @whitecoatcapxg
   
   Hey, everybody!   Cool. I think we're going to get started. Yeah, OK, great, so my name is Emily Eros, I'm with the Red Cross,we also have Seth and Nick. three people who just met yesterday stringing together a talk and hopefully it makes sense.
   I'll talk about the problems that we had to solve and why we wanted this developed. I'll pass it over to Seth and we'll go through the tech component and Nick is going to do an interactive demo with you guys.
   We do a lot of remote tracing of people all over the world, we do a lot of community mapping with different Red Cross's in different communities and we try to make the data useful in practice. And last year we just developed OpenMapKit. We were piloting different projects in Rwanda, and Bangladesh and things like that. This year we scaled up in a big way. We are just finishing mapping between 5 and 7,000 communities. The reason we've done this is because this was an area that is extremely vulnerable for Ebola, for other things like that, and there was a lot of fantastic tracing done as part of the HOT activation for Ebola, but we're two years later. We need to be updating this, and also, these are very difficult to map in the first place. So we're sending people in motor bikes to all of these communities. It works out to be an area roughly the size of Switzerland for perspective. So they're physically visiting each and every one of these communities. I think 100 of these we're mapping every single building, water point, school, etc. So this was a huge project for us. This was a huge scaling up of what we were doing. We had four months to do this, and so we had to kind of step back and think about, OK, what's our toolset, what's going to work here and what do we need to innovate very, very quickly to get this done. So in the past, we do a lot of work with Field Papers and with OpenMapKit. So we have a paper-based solution and kind of mobile phone based. And that's been great. It works really well, but there are some limitations that we face. For West Africa we're working kind of from the moment we set foot in this area, we realized that this was going to be a very remote place to work and a very challenging place to work. Connectivity is a huge problem. Many of the roads are impassable to cars point blank. Others are only passible during the dry season, which is four or five months. This is kind of standard practice for our volunteers, this is what they're going to have to traverse. Our volunteers will go for a week at a time without having any sort of cell data or internet connection, so if they're in the field we don't know if something has gone wrong, we don't know if our surveys are working, we can't do any troubleshooting often for a very long time. In the past I mentioned that mobile data solutions are fantastic when they work, but when they don't, we have some problems, so last year in Rwanda, we wanted to be using OpenMapKit to do some fieldwork in a rural area. We had some problems with MB tiles at the last minute and they we had tomorrow problems, I think it was the week after the Nepal earthquake and so it was a little bit overloaded and basically our troubleshooting is we had to stay up all night with headlamps taping Field Papers together and just kind of hoping for the best. And it was great, we got it done, but my boss can also tell you that I drafted a resignation letter during this trip.
   [laughter]
   So humanitarians are increasingly using cloud based technology and mobile phones and things like that but we're also working in more and more remote places and so we need something that works as a bridge, so that yes, you can use these things offline and collect data, but you also need to be able to push that somewhere, or if you need to modify something on the fly because there's a problem, you need something that's a solution you can use in the field. So we worked on POSM, portable OpenStreetMap and it looks like this. It's a $300 piece of hardware with some very fancy software but basically runs our full suite of tools. We can support a mapathon with I don't know, up to 100 people. Editing OpenStreetMap. We can cut Field Papers. We can develop OKD and OpenMapKit surveys, we can pull data off and check where that is. We're actually just kind of scratching the surface. We can also transfer Game of Thrones episodes to each other when we're out in the field. So we're still learning. But it's been a real game changer for us. It means that in Liberia, we can drive around, power this thing off of our car and we can pull data off of our volunteers, we can check it in in real time to see are they doing the mapping properly, are they having any problems, if so, what are they and if we can go over it again with them in the field. The Land Cruiser becomes our mobile office. It's also fantastic because it means that there is no change in our technical toolset if we use if we were mapping here in the states versus in the middle of nowhere. As part of this we also developed a mapping had you been in New Guinea, which was I think the epicenter of the ABL outbreak. It's kind of our base of operations and also a way that we're trying to build a sustainable communication. And the center doesn't have internet because I think it was $30,000 for three months of internet and we said no thank you and we're tethering off of phones, but basically for day to day, we're running everything off of POSM, so we can be disconnected for months at a time. We plug it in, get it ready, go to the field and play it back in at the end. We are so excited that these guys were able to develop this in time for us to use and it works great and I will pass the mic over and let them tell you more about it.
   >> Thanks, as we said, we call this portable OpenStreetMap and it's relin intended to be all of the different components of OpenStreetMap portable, so what this actually says on the tin. Get into that in a little bit. But first a brief shoutout to our sponsors and employers, Spatial Dev and then the Red Cross for funding us all in the first place, but really most importantly for all of you because you guys are the ones creating all of the data. We didn't write a whole lot of custom software for this at all. It's all glue. So thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.
   So stepping back, when we originally approached this project, we wanted to be able to OpenMapKit with Field Papers that also allows individuals to work out of the field, and to combine the two, so that when you create a field paper there's a corresponding OpenMapKit survey and there's also a way to collaborate and coordinate while you're in the field so that the Field Papers that you use on day two can incorporate the survey responses from day one without actually having to be connected to the internet.
   So I think of this as technology for uncertain environments and I think West Africa falls into that category. I think that hotel wifi falls into that category, because you never know what you're going to get and there's just a huge amount of uncertainty around that and you can't rely on utilities. We think of power as a utility. In the United States we think of cell phones as a utility. We think of internet as a utility, but in large parts of the world it's not a utility. information becomes a logistics problems where you need to word data from one place to another. And there's this issue of sneaker net that we've used in universities for years. You can run an an entire axes wifi off of this and you put it in the pouch of the motorcycle and then you drive to the mapping had you been and then you're good.
   So POSM combines OpenMapKit, which is the survey tool built on top of OpenDataKit and Field Papers. Lindsey Jacks from Cadasta is going to talk about that tomorrow.
   We're also going to hold a bits of a feather session at 5 p.m. in Pigott 19, I think. -- 109, OK, I missed a zero. There we go. And we'll have a couple of the POSM devices in there. I'm also going to be around on Monday during the code sprint because maybe we want to add some additional functionality. Oh, Anna from Spatial Dev wanted some more cat pictures. This is from our field testing trip to Ecuador. I thought it was pretty cute. So this is also from our field testing trip Ecuador. And this is the hardware, so approaching the hardware approach to it, so piles of phones all charged off of a USB hub and then the $3 hundred and under 12 watts or 10 watts or something like that I've got a kilowatt, we can try that out later. I've got a couple of these kicking around so it can run everything and it's a wifi hotspot. Those it's a local hotspot and it's your up the net, it's your intranet and it's running actually a full copy of OpenStreetMaps that contains the data intended for the area that you're editing, which means you can create field papers and you can edit data like you normally would in iD or JOSM and you can enhance it with all sorts of other stuff. This is a picture from the Red Cross headquarters in DC prior to the West Africa trip. Over in the corner that's 100 or 200 cell phones in a couple of Ziploc bags that are being sent out. So the question is, is it user friendly? And I would say no, it's really not user friendly, but I talked to these guys and apparently it is. So we've got a really long way to go. Partially because it's in many ways a proof of concept but it's actually being used in the field fairly effectively and it can be applied to other scenarios using other softwares and other data. There's no reason that it has to be OpenStreetMap, there's no reason it has to be geo. It could be used at track meets, talk to Jacob Lesser about that. He bought some of this hardware and he's trying it out doing timing and things like that at the track meets. It's disposable for workshops, so if you bring one of these along, people can deface it and if your wifi sucks, not a big deal. You can install etherpad on it, you can do all sorts of things. You could mail Wikipedia updates by mail and have a portable server that allows them to look Wikipedia, in isolated places. So Nick's going to talk a little bit about the OpenMapKit end of things and what types of possibilities the whole platform opens up.
   >> Hi. Yes, we promised a demo but we need a HDMI gendered attachment to get a Chromecast so we'll just have to show you at birds of a feather later. Anyway,I want to talk about what can POSM be used with applications outside of what the Red Cross is doing? It was built for the needs of the Red Cross and they were very much what we had in mind while building this entire thing, but there's a lot more that you can do, because this is OpenStreetMap, the software, running somewhere else. It's not running on OpenStreetMap.org. What's really special about that is you can put any data in there that you want, and you can have that data be under any license that you want. So for example, if you were a county service, maybe King County, and you had sewer data or you had very intricate GI S. data curbs of every street in Seattle, you might not to put that in OpenStreetMap, it just doesn't make sense, however, OpenStreetMap the software really does make sense for these strange use cases. And what's really special about it is there are businesses out that do a really, really good job at cartography, delivering maps and providing OpenStreetMap-related web services so what's really special is if you are generating data in the same schema as OpenStreetMap, with OpenStreetMap tags, you can easily deploy that, you can easily have web maps, you can easily have mobile applications that use that data without extra work, that extra work you would have to do if you were using proprietary GIS to create a map. Some other applications that I think could be really useful are -- is data that needs to not be public. Data that contains trade secrets for companies, like a distribution network for a transportation company. Gold prospects, things like that.
   [laughter]
   Thinking about Seattle and the Pacific northwest, think about Weyerhauser and all the data that they have they have GIS data that doesn't make sense to be in OpenStreetMap because it has information like how old are the trees in a stand? What is the boundary of a riparian area. Things like that. And that's like what I envision POSM in addition to the humanitarian world, where it can live and the potential that can come from that. So like I said, there's an ecosystem of creating OpenStreetMaps. And there's a lot of companies that support OpenStreetMaps, but there isn't much going on for running your own OpenStreetMap server. Questions?
   AUDIENCE MEMBER:  What kind of adapter do you need?
   >> So I have a Chromecast and you can use like -- the cool thing about Chromecast is you can screen share your Android device and it's a male HDMI connection and the dongle we have here is also a male. So we would need a female to female. Cool. Should have just asked that at beginning of the talk. Any other questions?
   AUDIENCE MEMBER:  How much does it cost?
   >> So the POSM itself, the hardware, costs $3 00 but in reality it's more like 3 50RBGS but still, if you could afford to get to this conference, you probably could afford the hardware for a POSM.
   >> And the software is free, completely. And on GitHub right now. It's all under the BSD license, so you can extend it, you can use it in your own products, etc.. And of course you need an Android phone. The reason why we OpenMapKit on Android phones is you can buy one for $50, so when the Red Cross for example is going to Liberia, they will have hundreds of phones. Similarly, outside of the United States h outside of Europe, everybody has an Android phone. Nobody has iPhones. So that's why that was our main goal of doing Android first.
   AUDIENCE MEMBER:  What operating system?
   So the POSM itself is running a Bluetooth 14.4. And one of our repos is called POSM build and it's a suite of shell scripts that installs all of our software on that specific setup.
   AUDIENCE MEMBER:  [inaudible]
   >> So that's a good question about Raspberry Pis. The thing is the actual OpenStreetMap stack has a pretty heavy requirement for rendering the tiles themselves. But you can use things like a Raspberry Pi for the rest of it so if you are doing the OpenDataKit workflow and you're collecting the data and you're not so much rendering the maps, you can install less on things like Raspberry Pi. Raspberry Pis work really well, and the OpenMapKit server part where you collect the server data, it runs on this, this is like, was it.6 volts? I mean you can basically keep this thick powered for weeks. And it's tiny. This one is about 60 bucks or something like that those are really fun to use. Basically anything that runs a Buntu will work.
   AUDIENCE MEMBER:  So are you saying then that you would download an image of the entire OpenStreetMap onto the POSM and then you'd go out in the field and update is and then when you got back to civilization you'd reupload it?
   >> Yeah, it's not an image. It's the actual data itself. So we get extracts of the OpenStreetMap itself for the area of interest we call it and you basically can update your data on the surveys on the POSM as well as through OpenMapKit surveys and then we synch it up to the main OpenStreetMap when everything is done and validated and corrected in the field.
   AUDIENCE MEMBER:  So [inaudible]
   >> Yes.
   AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Will you repeat the question?
   >> The question is to you don't have to physically construct the box. You can buy an Intel knock-in casing already or you can get your own casing and buy it without it, it's up to you, and then you basically can file the instructions and get an image of a Buntu on.
   >> Or if you send me brownies and the cost of the equipment, I'll do it for you.
   >> That's a good option, too. Yeah.
   AUDIENCE MEMBER:  
    [speaking off mic]
   >> That's really complicated, but yes, and that's actually one of the really big success stories about this. We've got a rather convoluted process that I've been sharing with some people and get it written up. I'm going to share it out more generally soon where it uses git to handle all the conflict resolution by taking a current copy and then comparing it to the stale copy is and reducing all of the merge conflicts as much as possible so it can be done in hopefully like 15 minutes with somebody who's familiar with the editing and it pushes the changesets back up. If you look at it it's a an import account that has 360 changesets or so in it that represents all of the changes that occurred while we were in Ecuador.
   AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Would it be reasonable to actually lock a region for like a month or something, or is that just trying to not allowed is it.
   >> Definitely, yeah. So the question was, can you basically lock an entire region? It would depend on the size of the region about if it's an area that doesn't receive that many edits, there aren't going to be that many conflicts. If it is an area that receives more edits, you're just going to need to do more conflict resolution. But that can all be done at once.
   >> I was going to say that the practicalities of this region is the Red Cross is we're really the only ones doing editing in the border areas. I think we kept an eye on it for a few months and there was no one else working in this area. There was a really bad cloud cover on the satellite imagery and there's just not a lot of editors in the border areas.
   >> One nice thing I'd like to mention is that we -- we want to have more organizations involved. And part of what's special about this is we want to have more of a data exchange. OpenStreetMaps is a spatial data exchange, but it's a lot easier to use than a geo portal and so what's really special is if the Red Cross does a bunch of work in Liberia, for example, and then another organization wants to share similar work, by uploading it to OpenStreetMap, you have that similarity. When you do surveys in OpenMapKit, one thing unique about it is there is a link back to the OpenDataKit survey in the chain set so you can be serving data that is not map-related that isn't tagged in OpenStreetMap, but you can still find that link back to the survey data itself in OpenStreetMap.
   AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Are they also friendly to US stick -- [inaudible]
   >> I think so. I had a really awesome experience a little while ago where the POSM in the other building didn't have all of the pieces required to serve map tiles and it also wasn't connected to the internet, so I borrowed Beth's Android phone, plugged is it into a USB and turned USB tethering on and then it had internet access. Which really -- yes, I don't know what specific hardware. Do we have time for one more or was that the last one?
   >> OK, one more.
   >> Are there current settings for.
   >> Are there privacy or security settings for mapping really sensitive data, not yet except for the fact that it's physically isolated from your network so it's got an air gap around it. This is one of the things that I think brook mentioned or no, you're brook. Anyway, we need to put an SSL certificate on it and we've also looked into doing encryption of some of the data. It's on the road map, but it's not currently supported. Thank you everything. Birds of a feather, 5, if you want to know more or if you're around for the code sprint, come find me and we'll try to make it do new things, because that would be fun.
   [applause]