"Building community through mapathons and community mapping."
      By: Drishtie Patel.
      >> Hey, everyone, my name is Drishtie Patel, can you guys hear me okay?
      >> No. get closer to your mic.
      >> All right.  This a little bit better?
      >> Yes.
      >> Cool all right.  So I'm going to talk a little bit about missing maps, it started as a humanitarian project, and it still is as a group of people that decided to get together and map out data with disasters.  So as you know when disaster strike, it's not time to start coordinating thousands of volunteers, so basically this project was created to get a Head Start of areas that are remote of having projecting and places that are most likely to get disasters, so we can be ahead of the game.  So essentially the whole aim of this project was to put the world's most vulnerable people on the map.  So we started with four people, American red cross, doctors without borders, and OpenStreetMap nonprofit and basically that's what we started there, and we had an outline of where we would go and last year I did the talk where we were eight months after we started.  So now almost two years into the project, kind of wanting to give you an update and show you where we are.
      We've added new members as well, so we now have the Netherlands red cross has signed up, the Clinton access initiative and how to vote University.  And basically everyone who signs on agrees to stick with the same thing of being open, respectful, and building capacity in these areas.  So it is a really nice group that chats almost every two weeks, and we communicate over Slack, you know, to make sure that we're all sticking to the same ethics and goals of getting the world mapped.
      So we have so far since we launched in November 2014 have had 275 mapathons in 33 countries.  11,800 contributors, 23 million edits to OSM, we've mapped 20 million people, and my favorite statistic is we've had roughly 19,320 slices of pizza.  Don't worry.  No one's job to count pizza slices.  This is rough estimate based on how many people have attended mapathons.
      So basically in the next day or two, you're going to hear other talks about the tech pieces that went into missing maps and the really cool invasions that they did basically to help us work in areas where there is no Wi-Fi and there is no power.  So my talk is mainly going to be focused on people aspect of it and how we've been able to grow really big and work with different groups, and it's really about building community.
      So when you look at statistics like that, it seems almost impossible when you think about only maybe two people, two and a half people full-time on this project.  So it's a lot to get done in a really short time.  But it mostly was because of the success of these different partnerships.  So reaching out, and you can see every stage of this project, which is the remote tracing.  So having mapathon parties in different places, to community mapping, which is going into country, and then adding that local data of street addresses and points of interest.  And then eventually using the data.  And at every stage, we work with different partners and that's how things get moving, you reach a wider network, and you get better data, and you learn things you haven't before; right?  Because has been around for a long time, but there's a lot of new things happening, and it always helps to have people who have done something similar where you can learn lessons from them and move forward and make your own mistakes and learn from them too, which is really cool.
      That's the only way to kind of move forward.
      So as far as building community through tracing, we have a few examples of what we've done in the past year.  And the very first people that we've reached out to was universities and colleges.  So this is kind of an easy target for us.  There's GW, which is right around the corner from us and then eventually George Mason student groups that were learning about geography and OSM and wanted to do something and students love to volunteer, and they need volunteer hours, so it worked out really cool.
      It ended up being something fun, and we started off what was called a map off between two schools and very quickly it grew to a point where we had schools from different states reach out to us, and we realized that it, you know, it wasn't as feasible to talk through, you know, every school or every organization, how to host a mapathon.  So we started creating materials to basically path it out on how to host mapathons but still stick to the theme and the quality and the training in OSM.
      So our website, we ended up adding a lot of data of basically how to, you know, even plan a mapathon.  So thinking about Wi-Fi.  That was a huge issue for us.  A lot of people -- we have great Wi-Fi, but when you have 20 people, and it crashes, and you have this huge event planned, it's kind of a problem.  So just simple things like that.  And there were different events ranging from, like, five people meeting at a coffee shop to 100 students.  What was really cool was being able to reach out to the OSM people that in those states had them attend that so we joined different communities together.  In different places.
      So, for example -- and this is basically one of the swag boxes.  We basically had over -- OSGM week which was last November our one year anniversary, and we had 83 different schools to signed up to do mapathons, so we decided to send mapathon care packages with lots of cool gifts and training materials and stuff like that, which would make your events a lot more fun.
      This is at Columbia University.  They actually have two different groups that were from different schools.  So the school of geography, and I think school of public affairs.  They didn't even know they were on the same campus and were super interested, so they got connected and were able to have a really cool mapathon and also some of them working with OpenStreetMap.  So lots of different worlds colliding, which is really cool.
      And then there's mapathons all over in different countries.  So we have local ones but also the international community.  So this was in Bali, also during OSGM week, Tanzania OpenStreetMap is working.  This was the digital humanitarian group in Pakistan.  I'm not going to say that name because I don't know how to pronounce it, but in the Netherlands.  So that's awesome.  We also have a lot of local mapping groups, which is really cool.  In fact, Chase, who was one of the organizing members for this conference, basically just randomly heard of missing maps, and he has an OSM contributor for a long time and ended up going to this event and was super helpful because he was able to help with any questions and training, which was really awesome.  And eventually ended up being, like, one of the coordinators that runs these mapathons.
      But bringing those two groups together gave us project momentum, and it allowed this.  So every month they could meet up and meet new people but also have access to this great OSM community that has a lot of information.
      So that was also something really cool.  We also have a lot of red cross chapters, which is really nice.  So being part of the red cross is cool because basically everywhere.  So there's one in L.A. the Orlando chapter also has one, Chicago, and it's also growing.  So we try as much as possible for OSM communities in those locations to have mapathons plus red cross has a tremendous amount of volunteers that want to do digital humanitarian work now, and it's a great way to volunteer.  So everyone's happy that way.
      We also have corporate partnerships.  And a lot of people ask us how these partnerships work.  And the really cool thing about missing maps is it's really organic, so we can grow in different areas.  But it also allows for different types of partnerships.  So you can be really dynamic in the types of people that you work with.  JP Morgan Chase was one of our partners, and we've been working with them.  So far had about ten mapathons.  And they full on just take an event space in their building.  So they have between 100 and 200 people set up computers, have a really cool mapping party, and they love this because it's a great engagement tool for their corporation as well.  So it's a great way to bring employees together and have the social aspect and while they're doing something good as well.  So it's really fun.
      Other ways we get partnerships is through donations.  So Cisco helped us with a donation that helped us fund a page, so if you go to the website, you can take a look at.  Basically we had a lot of people at mapathons trying to compare how they're doing compared to someone else.  And when you gamify something, everyone jumps onboard.  A what do you do in between?  Pizza is only going to take you so far.  So this was another tool that basically can help people keep track of what they're doing.  And this is Daniels who's on the team, he has some really cool statistics too.
      And you also get cool badges.  So as you're going through, there's really fun badges you can get, remote field or on the road again for mapping a certain amount of roads.  So you can keep going.  And the other cool tool is you can make a competitive feature on one of the user boards.  I don't have my computer plugged in, so I'll just tell you about it.  So you can have different hashtags through the tasking manager and basically use that to have competition.  So if it's two different teams within the same company or different chapters in different states, you can put the right hashtags in the tasking manager and cool up the stat slides.  So if you have a mapathon, you could have really cool training.  This is another partnership, this was through the dot without borders in London.  And one of the volunteers from the British red cross went to this and happened to work for CENTRA and went back and told the company about it, and they loved it to a point where they started creating their own training material to help with their employees and that's where we started our first videos.  They ended up having it within a couple of months, a mapathon for 900 people and just recently did their own, like, completely planned by themselves 700 people mapathon over 40 cities.
      So the reason for the success in these maps is the emerging community.  People come through feeling very passionate about it and given the right tools, they can go on and basically create their mapathons in their own communities, and they have the leeway to do that, which is really exciting.
      So community mapping, which is mapping we do in the field is a little bit different.  It's a little more challenging, so it's -- it's not something you can do completely remotely like the remote mapping and put instructions on a website and have people watch videos.  It's very hands on.  It also starts well.  So if we go on a two-week trip, we're planning for three months because you have to think about logistics, what are your technical capacity in that country?  We've been to I want to say nine countries now, and each time it's new and exciting, and we keep learning new things and we're also trying out new technology because OSM is great at collecting data in the U.S. or Europe or anywhere we have Wi-Fi it's awesome.  But what do you do in a village; right?  Where there's no power and no water?  And how do you upload that data at the end of the day or check it without access to all of these tools?
      So recently one example is of how we create partnerships with community mapping, there was a sense of project in a slum area which is a really, really big area.  It's a couple -- we'll see.  400,000 people so it's, like, 16 square miles.  It's like half a city in most places and this is all you see for miles is just shacks.  And through a lot of local intervention, they figured out there was the biggest problem was fires.  And so they got a local organization that was working that group that already had relationships with the local group that figured out how to work in that area as well and work with the red cross, and we went out there to map.  So, in addition to us reaching out to local universities, the road cross volunteers, to see if there was anyone doing OSM, we also worked with those local groups so that when we did the training, everyone basically got trained and now you're leaving with building some capacity and equipment so that they can continue mapping.
      And these are just kind of some of the pictures of what takes place.  You can see they're mapping with field papers over there and using GPS is because it was too dangerous to take cell phones.  Just some really great pictures.
      This was actually one of the community meetings that they have.  Through the red cross whenever they're doing projects, they do a lot of community meetings to engage with the community, let them know if you're going to have 40 people around your city or town, you kind of want to know what they're defining especially if they're in front of your house taking down your information.  So it's very important to spend a lot of time engaging with that community, even local government, even letting the police know that you're there.  But also training the local people because they get so excited when you, like, show them of where they live, and they can pin if I want to be.  It's super exciting.
      When we went to Columbia recently, one of our volunteers went home during training and basically mapped out his entire city and the roads all the way up to the city he was coming from.  And that was in a couple of hours, which was super exciting.  In Ecuador something very similar, what was really cool in Ecuador was, you know, there was a whole bunch of volunteers, but they were from all over the country.  So they came from different places, which is something different.  We tried usually they're all from the same place because they know the community better.  It was really cool.  A week later, they had an earthquake, and they were able to use the volunteers to help with disaster response because they were all trained in local data collection, and they had phones that we just left a week before, which sped things up with recovery.  So even with mapping in terms of OSM, this community expands a lot more, and it can make a huge difference in places.  And this is a picture of emergency response.  Something very similar in Dhaka through the missing maps British red cross and doctors without borders group, they went into they went to train a couple of people and create the first group of OSM people in Dhaka.  And after that multiple organizations have gone in there like the world bank, and I think save the children were there as well.  Using the same community and expanding to a point where now have 100 plus that are super good at OSM and collect data.  And help with a lot of things.
      So last thing was basically we have some really cool lessons learned, which we keep learning all about projects because it's new and not very many people have done this before.  But one of my favorites was a story.  And basically that one experience describes lessons that we've learned.  We had a kids mapathon take your kids to work day at JP Morgan Chase.  A couple of months ago.  And we started off here with maybe 25 kids and eventually there were 400.  So as you can imagine, quite challenging to try to figure out how you're going to keep the attention of a 7-year-old for, you know, a little time and have them not really call it data.
      But we've reached out to people who have done it before, we got really good lessons for what worked and what didn't work, and we were able to prep for it.  So, you know, not much craziness ended up happening luckily.  So it was just a matter of communication and reaching out.
      The other thing take risks just because no one else has done it before doesn't mean you should.  It may seem like a crazy thing to the community, but if you give it a try, and you, you know, try as much as possible to any issues, you can have a good time.
      The other thing is feedback.  So whether it's a 5-year-old trying to go on OSM with their parents or, you know, a 60-year-old or an 80-year-old.  There's so much to learn from people.  So if you just keep listening to what people are saying and, you know, each time you improve a little bit better, you can go to a really good place.  The other one was creating a self sustaining model, so it's obviously not practical with everybody working to go out and do this, like, seven days a week.  But if you can create community leaders, you can reach a lot more people.  Lots of people want to help and work with disasters and volunteers just to really human quality, and I think everyone wants to do it.  But giving them the tools to be able to do that and create a community is what drives things forward.  So we have a lot of training sessions, and we do that with our partners as well, which is really helpful.
      And last one is finding your way to yes.  Like, don't always take no as an answer.  If someone is saying can't be done, like, find a way.  I mean I brought cupcakes for our IT team for us to finally get Wi-Fi and opened up the ceilings to show new routers.  So there is a way, just look for it.  That's pretty much about missing maps.  The red cross group is all here and Dale will be giving a keynote tomorrow, so we'll get a lot more information, and you can always chat with them individually.  And they are hiring.  So if you guys want a job or know some people that are looking, chat with one of the red cross people.  Thank you, guys, so much.
      [Applause]
      >> Any questions for our speaker?
      >> I have a question.
      >> So hello.  In 2020 more people how to use Web mapping, and can improve technology and working in India, Africa, and northern America, people have to actively Web mapping.
      >> Yeah.  So that's a very common thing for us, and that's great.  We love for it to get to that place for people to be able to have Web mapping options.  But right now, the places that the red cross is working are very rural so they don't really have access to Internet most of the time, however.  So we're kind of using a paper net but also showing that, you know, they learn how to use OSM and JOSM actually so that they can see.  But we hope one day to get to the Web mapping stage.
      >> A question back here.
      >> Hello.  Loved your presentation.  Gave me some ideas for Wikipedia community building.  So thank you.  I'm curious why are you using OpenStreetMap as opposed to some of the other mapping tools that you could be using for some of this type of work?  I'm not deep into maps and technical world.  I'm just curious why you choose this particular tool to do the kind of work that you're doing.
      >> I'm not the tech expert, but I'm going to give you my best answer, so feel free to change it.  But OpenStreetMap what we found was the most open platform that we could use.  But also reaching other people, there was a lot of training material on how to use it, it's fairly easy, fairly similar.  People feel they have ownership of the data, which is nice, and it's also a very unique community to get involved with.  And it, like, aligns with humanitarian purposes really well.
      >> Another question.
      >> Hi, I notice you worked a lot in informal settlements and communities, and I'm just wondering how you deal with the reality that sometimes it's not fresh?  That changes often.  So how do you know when your maps are really out of date, and you do any work on crisis settings like refugee camps or something like that where that's probably even a bigger problem.
      >> That's a really great question.  So that's completely true, though, and in settlements that there's a fire or natural disaster, these metal houses, which are basically five pieces of metal will come down right away and within two days they'll build another one.  So it is very transient, and we do understand that when we're building projects.  We understand that with our community mappings with a project that's taking place.  So we worked out the timeline and that's why we trained the local community to be able to do it.  So they can do that upkeep.  So once they know.  And we always leave equipment behind.  So that's the mobile phones and computers and a lot of it is open and free.  All of it is open and free that we use.  So it's not hard for them to access.  So once that community is trained, there's usually like 40 people between university students, they can go back and change that.  And then the second question was.
      >> Do you do any work in --
      >> Disaster response, yes.  So in a disaster response setting, we don't do a lot of local mapping because it's more -- there's a lot of that's going on on the ground and the people in that country obviously busy.  There's a lot of remote mapping that happens, which is a big thing in humanitarian OpenStreetMap.  So if you look at the tasking manager, a lot of different organizations will put stuff up, even the disasters that don't show up on media like the small scale ones will show up where people are helping, and they have people all around the world that help coordinate these efforts so that you can go in and do mapping and put roads and buildings in and you can see sometimes there's people that exist there.
      >> One last question for you.
      >> Sure.
      >> A couple slides back you mentioned it's too dangerous to have cell phones and you were using a GPS.  What was dangerous about cell phones?
      >> So a lot of these areas are really poverty-stricken areas.  So if you walk around with cell phones, you know, you're more likely to get mugged because it's a really easy thing to sell in other countries.  But we also, like, go in groups to avoid any of those situations and have community leaders and stuff.  But it's always better for us to take precautions.  And if the volunteers don't safe, we'll find another way.
      >> Thank you very much.
      [Applause]