"Lowering the Barriers to Participation with Field Papers"
   by Lindsey Jacks
   Live captioning by Norma Miller.
   @whitecoatcapxg
   
   
   All right, hello everyone. We ready to get started?
   >> Cool, so my name is Lindsey Jacks, I work at the Cadasta Foundation as a developer. I'm originally from Arkansas, my background is in anthropology. I decided to want to become a programmer because I thought fundraising was super-boring, but staring at three lines of code for three hours was exciting. I'm new to the mapping community, but I'm excited to find a place where all of my background can be packaged up into a nice little bow. I'm excited to see Field Papers in so many of the presentations today. I had no idea how many people were actually using it when I started this. And you'll probably hear people saying and we'll use Field Papers and move on without any explanation for what it is. I want to talk about the why before getting to the what. So for the first little bit I'm going to focus on the following question: How do we increase participation in community mapping projects? So this is is a pretty broad question and so let's come up with a goal for our hypothetical community mapping project. Let's say that we want to involve more community members in the mapping project so they feel ownership of the project. It's our belief. 
   At Cadasta that if you want the effects of your project to last, you need to make sure you get buy-in from the people most affected. If they feel ownership of the project throughout the process, it's more likely to have a lasting impact. So we're going to break that down into two more things. We want to lower the barrier to participation for people that are interested but intimidated by the process. How do we insure that we're not leaving people out who are not unfamiliar with the process or the tools that we're using and two, we want to find a way to include people who would normally be left out due to a lack of resources or technology.
   In many situations, especially in the nonprofit world, you're have limited funding.
   So when you're looking at lowering barriers and trying to work within resource constraints, you need to know what your options are.  At Cadasta, we provide a customized set of tools to find the best way for each community to map their own information. What works for community A isn't necessarily going to work for community B because of a difference in resource, demographics and size. For example, when we partnered with Kosovo, our focus was on mapping the property rights of women in the village who didn't have good documentation or had documentation in the names of their missing male husbands. Or relatives.
   When we joined them, they had already collected high resolution imagery from drones. So what they were interested in doing was using mobile technology to replace paper-based technology. Paper-based methods.
   So by the time we joined, they already had the imagery and they already had technology, so moving forward with tools like geo OpenDataKit totally made sense, however, not every group we work with is going to necessarily have access to this high resolution imagery. That would be awesome, but totally unrealistic. In some cases they won't even have access to mobile technology.
   Because of this we make suggestions and recommendations based on what makes sense for each unique case. So let's talk about resource utilization first because there is a topic that many nonprofit organizations lose sleep over. Chances are if you are a nonprofit, you have limited resources and technology is expensive so to make sure that we're choosing the right tools we always ask ourselves the following questions: What is the problem we're trying to solve? What are the existing tools? Do these existing tools meet our needs? If they don't, can they be modified, and finally, what is the cost. Not only the actual cost of the technology, but for staff time and maintenance. Something to keep in mind answering these questions is that introducing any new tool takes time, money and effort. Choosing the tools that you're working with within your projects, if you get the chance to check it out, I highly recommend it. But if you're looking at the cost of the tools and the cost of the staff time and the training, you better make sure that what you're choosing is worth it. New technology and mobile technology andiron technology are all great and in many cases they're the correct answer. When we worked with Kosovo we confirmed that using tablets and tools like geoD collect, they didn't add any additional time and they produced more accurate data. It solved our problem, it was cost-effective and it could be modified to fit our teams. It was a win-win all the way around, so yay, team!
   We have to put a lot of thought into what we're doing. Does the benefit outweigh the cost? Does the introduction of these tools introduce a barrier to participation that wouldn't have been there otherwise? In the case of Kosovo they had the infrastructure in place to quickly adapt to this form of data collection so it made sense. In a situation with less funding and less technology, you should be able to change. So what are the tools that exist to solve our problem? There are so many. In the mapping universe we have GPS device, we have OpenDataKit, OpenMapKit and drones and the list goes on, because it's an exciting time to be alive.
   Do they meet our needs? If they don't meet our needs, can they be modified to do so? Maybe, if you have want to hack on a drone, be my guest, but that's going to take a little more time. And finally, what is the cost and this is sort of where it falls apart in this example. Technology is expensive, devices break, people need training, so sure it would be awesome if we could have a small fleet of drops, a pile of tablets and enough GPSs to arm the entire village but that's expensive and given the background of the village there's a chance they would need more training. So there are a ton of variables you have to consider before jumping on what's new an exciting. Whether or not we're willing to sacrifice some of the benefits of this technology should depend on how it affects participation, because technology still needs humans.
   When you're looking at the technology you're choosing, you should think about the number of people that will be able to be involved and what kind of training is required, which is reliant on a number of factors, including sophistication of the technology and the prior knowledge of the community. In Kosovo, training took a half day. In the village of people unfamiliar with mobile technology, it would take a bit longer.
   Much like the choice of technology, the amount of training will be unique to the community that you're working with. So let's think about that remote village again. Say you have the resource to purchase some tablets, you decide that a few people with tablets is going to be a lot faster and more accurate and ultimately cheaper than training an entire village on something else so that's where you decide to put your resources and that's a legitimate choice. So you buy a bunch of tablets and you train two people to use them. 
   Great, so these people know how to run the tablets so they can run the project. But because they can now use computers, they decide to move to a city so congratulations you improved the lives of two people. Now, this is not something that happens every single time. But it does happen on occasion and it's something that you need to take into consideration. 
   While it might be more cost-effective to train a small group of people, the problem is that you can't rely on them to remain in the community forever. If one person decides to move and take all the knowledge with them, your project dies, if your knowledge is spread across a wider pool of people it will less likely be a problem. In addition to decreasing the risk of your project, the more people you involve the more access to information you have. 
   Participatory mapping, the emphasis here is my own is based on the premise that local inhabitants have excellent knowledge of their local environment. You have to get people involved. If you don't, you're missing out on your greatest pool of information, you are a cheating yourself, you're cheating the project and most of all you're cheating the community you're trying to help. 
   The greatest lesson is you don't know the answers. You don't even know the right questions until you get there and start talking to people that live there day to day. It's also hard to get people to care about the work that you're doing if you don't include them in the process.
   So what now? Let's look back at that remote village again. What's our problem? Our problem is we're working with a community it limited access to mobile technology and you have limited resources. Some possible exclusions are you could spend your money on drones which would be super-cool but you'd get zero community buy-in aside from vague curiosity. 
   You could get a couple of computers and train a few people. You could maybe buy more tablets, but then you're leaving people out who are intimidated by the process or arbitrarily limiting the number of people who can participate because there's only so much tech to go around. So the technology that we've been implementing in every other situation suddenly doesn't work. So what do we do?
   Don't spend time and money on new technology if a good solution already exists.
   And I would argue that sometimes a pen and paper is the best option. At Cadasta, we know we're only filling a void. Even with all these advances we still rely heavily on a paper-based approach to data collection and we are always looking for ways to improve even this simple approach. 
   And all of this led us to Field Papers. So Field Papers is a tool that was built by stayman group that allows you to select an area on a map, print it on to paper, take if out in the field, mark all over it, take a picture of said paper, load it back up and edit your annotations and if that sounds super big it's vague, it's because that it is. 
   And I would argue that vague is a good thing. It's simple, it's easy and it's open ended. There's not a whole lot of say about it and that's really the beauty of the project. So I'll walk through it now. I'm not doing a live demo, because I'm not brave enough. So once you visit Field Papers.org you're presented with this page. You'll click on make yourself an atlas. What you'll see there is a page with grids on it and the grids represent individual pieces of paper. 
   You can adjust the number of grids, you can adjust the paper size, width or orientation, you can change the base map so if you're worried about saving ink, you can use black and white. If you don't care about ink, you can use satellite imagery. You'll click make an atlas and from here you can download it as a PDF.
   And at this point, you'll get these pieces of paper which you might have seen in some other presentations. The dots there are for geo referencing once you load it back in and your QR code connects the physical map to the map that's in Field Papers. You'll take it out on the field, write all over it could your heart's content and once you're done, you're going to take a picture of this and load it back into Field Papers, which looks super unexciting, but what's cool is you can take it into the iD editor and trace your annotations straight to OSM. 
   You don't need a GPS to make a map or learn fancy software to use Field Papers. Field Papers fills the need of Cadasta and many of its partners, because it's easy to use, it's inexpensive, it allows people to stretch their resources and it allows a minimal amount of training. Many of the partners we're working with are already familiar with the participatory mapping but the problem is that so much of this information never goes anywhere. Field Papers bridges that gap because it allows you to load everything that you've connected straight into the OSM. And if you saw the POSM talk yesterday, you're constantly building on the work that you're doing. It gives participatory mapping projects life beyond the paper that they're collected on. If any of you are run or attended community mapping projects, like the mapping DC that was presented earlier, Field Papers provides a unique opportunity to make it easier for people to get up and go. 
   There's less fear about messing up real data in OSM, there's no need for everyone to have the same operating system and there's no concern about running out of battery and at the end all of this information still goes back into OSM. I'm not encouraging people not to use OSM, I'm encouraging you to get new and creative ways to get people to contribute. They don't have to understand anything about open mapping to understand Field Papers. 
   Because Field Papers is open source, Cadasta was able to get involved and make improvements to the project and Cadasta sponsored an intern. The old Field Papers consisted of four steps, search, select, describe, and layout, and the two main issues that continued to pop up on the GitHub account was that this process was a bit confusing, and the actual creation stage was far too small to be able to like navigate comfortably. 
   So what we focused on, and what the final design looked like was we took these four steps, meshed them all onto one page and pushed them on the size so that the focus could be on the full screen map. 
   The process is all there so they can see everything they have to do before moving on and we also simplified the grid interaction, which was pretty tough to navigate, you had to drag the map, then drag the grid, then drag the map then drag the grid. This one behaves a lit more like a lens of a camera, so as you scroll across the grid goes with you. We have a lot more plans. We want to turn it into an isolated reusable component that can be plugged into any software. 
   Currently it's locked into Field Papers.org which is built on a Rails application. Inside of that is the leaflet in Javascript and the actual conversion to PDF happens in Python so we want to tease all of that and make it an isolated component that people can plug and play in any software, because we think this has application outside of where it's currently reaching. We want to up update the georeferencing system, so the dots are fine and they work, but with the advancements and image recognizing software, we think we can take advantage of that. 
   Because currently if you fill in the dots or play connect the dots with the dots, they don't work, and they cover up part of the map which isn't super convenient. We also want to increase the capacity for UAV and high-quality imagery. We actually tried to use Field Papers in Kosovo with the imagery that they had collected but it wasn't quite set up to handle that. It can handle satellite imagery but it's not quite ready for that level of detail but we wanted to take advantage of that. 
   After seeing the POSM talk yesterday I personally would like to make it mobile friendly. We talked to the community a little bit but without seeing how people were using it day to day it was tough to make these assumptions so we focused on desktop only but I would like to make that work within the POSM system that's set up. We're still figuring out the best way to go about it. If any of these you find particularly interesting or you think you have a great solution for it, we're working on it tomorrow during the code sprints and we would love to hear from you and we would love to have people join us. I personally love Field Papers, because it's way to get people to get involved and it would be great if other people joined in on it, so thank you.
   [applause]
   Questions yes.
   AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Sorry for my English, I'm from Colombia I have a question. We work with Field Papers and a tasking manager instant. Is there going to be more integration between the tasking manager and the Field Papers, like the same imaging area --
   >> I got it absolutely from Seth.'S very excited about this, so yes. Seth is one of the original designers that I've met this weekend for the first time, so yes, yes.
   AUDIENCE MEMBER:  OK, great.
   >> Yes?
   AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Just when people are filling these out, particularly in more densely -- areas with a higher density of features, pen thickness, pen color, being able to make out what people are writing or doing, how do you overcome those kinds of challenges?
   >> Right, so I haven't tested this ha whole lot but just the little bit that I've played with it, the higher quality the image, the better it's going to -- so I took this with my phone and you can tell that it's pretty spotty because the lighting wasn't great and you have to get pretty close to it to be able to actually edit it in OSM, so the more zoomed in you are on the space the better it's going to be because you won't be able to see the actual markings until you get close enough. It won't appear at a certain zoomed-out level.
   >> I'm also talking about the challenge for users, as well, so if you have a densely featured map and you're asking them to annotate or do things like that, it might be challenging for them to get their annotations in there. There's like an urban density thing going on.
   >> Yes, yeah, tile resolution, and also what's nice about this is they can do their best and it can be corrected on the end because you're not editing data straight in. You have a chance to toy with it the at end if things aren't going quite right.
   >> So Field Papers is excellent for very dense areas. We've used field papers in Daka in Bangladesh which is the densest city in the world. That was all done in fold papers using OpenStreetMap. Pen width is not really an issue. You say something about colors, we'd love to see colors OCR, if you draw red, what does that mean, if you draw blue, what does that mean so you'd have to do less drawing.
   AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Question from one of the Wikipedians in the room. So I've gotten bits and pieces of this throughout the weekend and I'm excited by what I see here, but I'm still not following the total workflow. So I'm wondering if you've got it documented at the website the process. Because I'm thinking of some applications where we might be able to do some joint stuff.
   >> So I don't know if there is specific lined out start to finish. There definitely should be, but what's nice about it is it's simple enough that you can kind of walk through it and play with it on your own, that's almost the best way to sort of figure it out because it is a fairly simple process and it's fairly vague until you actually get in there and do it.
   AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Hi there. I'm from the field sensors and we're working with a -- [inaudible] or to compliment data of the census. One of the problems they were having there was to what they call segmenting, the unit to run the survey. Is it possible to run some kind of algorithm that may set a second for these people?
   >> Could you clarify?
   AUDIENCE MEMBER:  The point being you have to run a census, OK? And you need a unit which is basic. Sometimes it's basic and you can do it with a usual selection, but sometimes it's not. Is there any experience where you have been working that has set somehow units to survey, or not? Within the --
   >> Not in my personal experience.
   >> What if you have to survey an old land uses or different units that look alike?
   >> Oh, OK, I see what you're saying. So I think to answer your question, you can change the base map that you're working with and you can also add your own tiles, so if you're looking at specifying certain features, is that what you're saying?
   AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Yes, but a geometric feature, not exactly a feature, a special object as a unit. That covers, like, say 10 houses or --
   >> Yeah, you could add your own base map, so we can integrate with other tools to make that happen. If you add your own base map, you can sort of cover whatever you want and it will still print out whatever you're seeing.
   >> It will print within the field maps for your reference?
   >> Yes. I think that answers it. Time for one more?
   >> Yes?
   AUDIENCE MEMBER:  So a question I've had about Field Papers as somebody who used to work for the company who made Field Papers, is there an easy way to get or is there an easy way to and is there a reason to not put the data into OpenStreetMap and is there a way to put it into a separate database if you need to?
   >> Yes, so like the last talk I was talking about, there's sometimes data that's not appropriate to put straight into OSM. You can use it in other editors, so this just creates a base-layer map that you can export to other editors depending on what you want to use. So this picture that you end up with here is just that extra custom base layer.
   Cool. Thank you. 
   [applause]