The Reality is Virtual: U.S. College Students Assist MapGive and USAID
   by Thomas Gertin and Rory Nealon
   Live captioning by Norma Miller.
   @whitecoatcapxg
   
   All right, before we start the next presentation, I have one announcement. There will be a whole conference group photo in front of the library which is out here at 2:15, so if you go out this way in front of the building, around 2:15, you should see a lot of other people, and we will all get together and take a big photo with the whole conference.
   And now, let's welcome our next two presenters.
   >> Good afternoon, we're super excited to be here in Seattle for SOTMUS2016. I'm Tom Gerten and I'm Rory Nealon.
   >> My office is the Humanitarian Information Unit, and we are an interagency center composed of multiple specialists. We range from humanitarian analysts and researchers, also have GIS analysts and cartographers to make some great maps. You could visit us and check out some of our great products at HIU.gov. Also we're big proponents of open data. We post. We're also a hub enabled to interact ... ...
   [inaudible]
   And one of the ways we do this is through our MapGive initiative, which is a flagship initiative of the State Department's Open Government Plan, and we aim to increase the number of digital humanitarian mappers by supporting OpenStreetMap. You could go to our website at MapGive.state.gov and figure out why you should map and learn some of the tools and then get started by mapping some of the HOT mapping tasks and as I mentioned before, we also provide commercial satellite imagery for tracing for some tasks and we also support events and mapathons, as well.
   >> Cool, so I work at. USAID in a small office. Just for those real quick I won't bore you too much with the bureaucracy, but USAID's mission is to help: So where does my office fit all into this, well, we work at the very local, local level as much as possible. 
   (Technical difficulties with the audio).
   How there's so much out there for the national level, but very little at kind of the micro-and local level. There's other US offices that do a way better job of collecting statistics at the national level, so oftentimes there's an absence of that at the local level and that's where it comes in for us. At any given time we're working in about 15 countries around the world more or less, across the geographic extent of the globe and so we have a very large diversity in projects. Each country will be very different from what's going on in another. One being maybe covering a new election that's going on up while another is supporting the opening up of the media.
   >> So this past September, we were ready to take off with the VSFS program. This was our second year doing it as an office. We were equipped with lots of existing OpenStreetMap materials already, and also our special fuel was loads of intelligent US college students motivated to get mapping right away. We collaborated with each other and found out that we had several similar goals, in MapGive, we really wanted to spread out our wings and hit up different geographic areas outside of the Washington area and OTI, they were interested in connecting students as a resource to their programs in the field and identifying gaps in mapping and have them become mapped in OpenStreetMap.
   So you could find out more and even sign up yourself by going to VSFT.state.gov. It's the largest virtual internship in the world. And US students could contribute an average of 10 hours a week, though we average slightly less, I believe, and it's a smart and transparent way for government and citizens to collaborate on projects. people could apply by going to USAjobs.gov and later on this summer we'll accept some of the applications and get started in September and it lasts throughout the school year and usually ends around the following April.
   >> Yeah, so like Tom mentioned, we had some areas of overlap and kind of structured or program the same way. In the first phase we got students familiar with OpenStreetMap. A lot of them are coming in with absolutely no familiarity at all and zero background knowledge at all. So getting them up and registered was a task itself, because there were so many. Pointing out the resources. There are so many that exist out there and then third getting them up in the infrastructure, without that kind of basic instruction of how data is structured in OSM you're not really contributing that much. So one of the first tasks is to highlight as an example we got them to do is map their home town, specifically their house and if that was already in there, maybe one of their favorite stores or ice cream shops or something like that.
   >> And then we just jumped into the separate OpenStreetMap tools. I'm sure everyone here is familiar with iD editor, it's a great tool, and we went straight there, and they also have a built-in tutorial right there, and then we jumped in the OpenStreetMap task view manager and explained how it's used to organize mapping projects among various mappers and how it's also a useful tool for validation.
   >> So after we got them familiar editing with iD, we wanted to take them to the next step by using JOSM to do QA on different projects around the world. There's a need to kind of go in and validate the work that have been because oftentimes these mapping parties that have been hosted will have absolute novices kind of mapping, so using the advanced features in JOSM to contribute. To help facilitate this, we had an online training we gave our students, which was a little bit difficult to organize, different time zones, different things going on but we were able to coordinated the training over Google hangouts. It was our first time doing this so it was not the smoothest thing possible but we're hoping to improve upon it the next year and also spread the work around between the different organizations so it's not just one of us doing all the lift.
   >> And in addition to mapping each week in OpenStreetMap. We wanted to introduce some of the other projects and get them involved with other projects within our oft, so here are just two examples in the HIU. One of them is the humanitarian data exchange. This is sort of one of our analysts go to spots for humanitarian information, different agencies could just upload their latest datasets, and they had recently created a freshness dashboard where they classified each of the datasets based on how often they should be updated and this will help make the datasets more relevant so they asked for our help and our interns using Google sheets, they did research on over 3,500 of their datasets and classified them. Oh, how often should that this dataset be updated so that will help them contact some of the dataset owners so they could keep them up to date.
   Another one of our projects was for PEPFAR, the president's emergency plan for aid relief, and our in-office PEPFAR analyst was able to provide us with a dataset in Cameroon, so using Google sheets, again our interns went in and they researched using OpenStreetMap and gazetteers and geo names and were able to come up with some better locations for some of these points. Here' how the dataset looked before and you can see that some of the points were even outside the country, so they definitely had to be rectified here.
   [laughter]
   >> Cool.
   As far as OTI went we did it a little differently. We wanted to connect our interns to be a resource for them. So we kind of structured it around what our interns wanted to do. We were pretty flexible. We just wanted to see what type of interest our students had and how can we structure that to benefit our office. So we assigned a geographic region based on where it is located. As well as doing research to try to identify gaps in OSM data. And I think what really helped was engaging the OSM communities in these countries. Not all of them had a very active community but when possible trying to align our needs with theirs. So this was basically formalize in a work plan. Of course random things would pop up over time such as hot tasks that are super important or a new country program that started in our office which needed to be supported. Our office takes a very unique approach compared to others in US AID. I don't want to get too much in the weeds but we basically throw a lot of different activities out there, to try to see which ones stick and so we need a broad range of data points to support that initial push for finding the true purpose of the program. So we identify what the problem is but we trying to figure out what is the most appropriate tool and we try to supplement our knowledge there with as much data points as possible.
   >> And one way we improved was our communication tools from the previous year mainly used email but this year we decided to build on Slack incidents we were already using, we use Slack, which is basically I think of it as instant messaging on steroids. It's very easy to use and you can create different communication channels, so we created a private channel and added our interns there, and it was really great, because they got to ask each other questions if they had a small, you maybe digitizing question, they could just upload the building and ask about it. They also answered each other's questions, which was great. Also we used Google hangouts for training and it was beneficial because we could record the video and post it online.
   >> Yeah, one thing we had our students use Slack for was to post the changeset data this they did so another student could check what they did just to make sure we had high-quality edits.
   And now we'll go into the metrics and measuring production of what our students actually did. We're hoping to blow this out of the water next year. So yeah, we had a pretty diverse group of students from around the US and I think they really complemented each other. Of course there's a large concentration of colleges and students from the northeast but we did get a pretty good range I feel like and I know you wanted to give a shoutout to all your interns.
   >> Our intern Taylor Hickson did this map here. And I think next year we're going to introduce more tutorials how do you extract data and maybe build on that, as well.
   >> And this is sort of a word cloud, I know our colleague David Seeger hates word cloud, so we had to throw this slide in.  But basically we had a lot of people studying public relations, which is great. Half of our interns studied geography. This program is really geared towards everybody. We start from Step 1, and you know, we also had a significant amount of advanced degrees, as well. So want to show that.
   >> So we tracked this by using hashtags in the chain set of course so we had about 450 from my group, 706 from Tom's for a total of about 760,000 changes on the map.
   And here we have a torque map which is animating all the changes throughout the year. Lots going on. Two things that sort of stick out. One was last November we helped out in response to Hurricane Patricia in western Mexico. Shortly after that, there was an earthquake in eastern Afghanistan. Our students also mapped that. That's one of the strengths we figured out was ability to do search mapping when it's needed and there was some projects that you noticed too, right, Rory?
   >> Yup, so this is some more visualization of the previous map but we had a new program start in Macedonia, so like I mentioned we wanted to flood that with as much data as we could, so we have our students working there. We also have two programs in eastern Lebanon and Syria, and so we had students really focus there so you can see a large concentration there.
   >> Also I was able to go to Peru last winter and do a three-day mapping workshop and it was really cool we look forward to adding new metrics in the future. There's a lot of work to be done and look forward to working with all the great people as well.
   Just another visualization to see our changes over time. You can see spikes, I think a lot of them are related to hot tasks that we helped or our students helped out with. The same one over here, split between OPI and MapGive. Tom was really nice and gave his students the winter off while I had mine keep working so you can see that in there. But that shouldn't discourage you from choosing one over the other.
   >> So we're really excited, we're definitely doing this project again. We're going to have three strong groups working side by side and we're going to get back into lab and have some lessons learned. Essentially we figured out some of the strengths of the program. People are good at mapping, doing search mapping, but also we have a longer amount of time than usual so we could really hit up on advanced mappings techniques and want to focus more on validation, for next year, as well. We're going to continue using hashtags, probably use combined hashtags, but also individual hashtags, hopefully we'll get additional metrics such as number of buildings and road and whatnot. We also gave out some surveys and some of the things we're going to improve upon is having more contact with volunteers, maybe using some of our in-office volunteers to provide feedback and hand to handcritiques, but also creating an alumni group. So if we create a group in Link in or Facebook, they could continue contributing in there.
   >> Any input from your end?
   >> Yeah, I think this was a great experience. It wasn't just us getting value out of it. Our students did, well, one of them was able to get a scholarship to attend this conference so she's here today, I think. Also, I was able to write letters of recommendation and help students get course credit, so they didn't just do this for us. We helped them out and I think they got some valuable skills out of it and the other thing we want to require, I think in the future is have students sponsor a mapathon in their school engaging their population with this. So yeah, thanks for listening. Here's the links to sign up if you're a college student or in a master's program. It's a really cool opportunity, like I said, normally DC gets flooded with unpaid interns in the summertime, where they have to subsidize their own housing and food costs, so this gets you very valuable experience, but from the comfort of your own home, and I think a little bit of a smaller financial impact on the pocketbook. And we'll really look forward to working with you, so tell your friends and neighbors and nephews and grandchildren and stuff.
   [applause]
   >> Questions? Are there any questions? Or is everyone just hungry? No problem.
   AUDIENCE MEMBER:  So maybe I missed this one you said in the beginning, but are there any international students that are engaged in this, like mapping their own environments and --
   >> I'm glad you asked that. I think that's actually a great opportunity. This program isn't set up for that, but I do want to plug in Youth Mappers is an initiative of USAID and they are partnering with many international universities and students, so I think that would be a great way to get involved if you're internationally based.