Category: Mapping Party

Saturday 26^th of September saw a Maptime Tanzania event take place with the goal of mapping Dodoma, Tanzania’s capital city. The event took place at the Kinu Innovation Space with over thirty people in attendance including community members, students, and techies.

We had a number of special guests in attendance, including David Taylor from what3words (http://what3words.com/). what3words is aimed to give everyone in the world an address and does this by dividing the world into a global grid of 57 trillion 3mx3m squares. Each square has a 3 word address that can be communicated quickly, easily and with no ambiguity. David gave a background to the organisation as well as discussed how what3words can be applicable to individuals and organisations in Tanzania. 

The Ramani Huria team gave an overview of what OSM is, and many elements of mapping, so that those new to mapping could get a brief understanding of the components. The supervisors showed us their skills with the first ‘OSM Fight’ of the day, with Innocent (@iam_innosaint) beating Calist (@evance_calist) 5-3! 

With quite a number of new mappers in the group, the tables were organised to ensure experienced and new mappers could sit with one anything and assist in the mapping process. The city of Dodoma was divided into sections and each table assigned an area, then the race to map was on!

We made the day competitive and used the Open Street Map Reporter Tool (http://osm.linfiniti.com/) to track which users had contributed to most to the mapping of Dodoma. The competition was fierce with the top users constantly edging one another out of the top spots. In the end, the #MapDodomaGuru was named the as Mboya Mkundelida – congratulations! 

It was a great day of mapping and we were proud to get our capital city on the map! The next Maptime Tanzania event will take place at Buni, on Saturday, October 17th, from 10 am. See details on the Facebook event page and sign up via Eventbrite. You can also view the details of our previous Maptime events & mapping parties on our blog. 

The 5th Ramani Huira mapping party took place at Buni on the 29th of August. The theme of the event was “Map My Hometown On OSM” #MMHOSM, an opportunity to map the participants’ towns, many of which were completely unmapped.

Towns mapped on the day included parts of Mwanza, Arusha, Mbeya, Bukoba, Tanga, Moshi. Around thirty people attended the event, both students from UDSM and Ardhi University, and members of the Tanzanian tech community. The attendees were split into two teams to map the towns, with people competing to map their hometowns and have the best-mapped city.

The mapping party also showcased Mapillary, an online map and community of crowdsourced street-level photos. Mapillary also has a mobile application which is a tool in capturing photos and directly uploading them to the Mapillary map, which can be accessed by anyone.

The next mapping party will take place at Kinu on Saturday 26th of September with the theme of ‘Map Dodoma!’, with the focus of the day being mapping the capital city of Tanzania. The event is open to new and experienced mappers, with support and training provided to all. The event will run from 10 am-1 pm and updates will be posted on the Facebook event page.

Ramani Huria held our fourth mapping party on Saturday, July 25th, at Buni Innovation Hub. Forty-eight students attended the event, primarily from Ardhi University and the University of Dar es Salaam. Mapping Parties are part of Ramani Huria’s ongoing community events with the aim of building, strengthening and spreading the use and ethos of Open Source data, specifically the use of OpenStreetMap, a free editable map of the world.

This month’s mapping party focused on the HOT Tasking Manager, an incredible tool used for collaborative mapping globally by the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) globally. 

The first session was led by Steven Bukulu (Mapping Supervisor in the Ramani Huria project), who explained that the HOT Tasking Manager divides up a mapping job into smaller tasks that can be completed rapidly. The tool also shows which areas need to be mapped and which areas need the mapping validated – the process of validating ensures that the areas mapped are correct and of a high standard. Steven concluded the session with a video that shows the case study of Nepal and how HOT responds to vulnerable areas that need maps that could help in disaster recovery efforts. The video shows HOT activities after a major earthquake in 2015 and how volunteers contributed to map generation/production with the use of drones, that provided high-quality imagery used for digitization.

Link to Embed: https://www.youtube.com/embed/DxYKDHbzCpg

‘Nepal Quake: Could a mapping project help with recovery’ VIDEO SOURCE: BBC

The second session, introduced the participants to Mapillary, a street view mapping application. Geoffrey a mapping supervisor from HOT explained, “Mapillary is a service for crowdsourcing street view photos. Anyone can collect photos with simple tools such as smartphones or action cameras. These photos are then combined into a street-level photo view of that particular area, are uploaded and shared on the mapillary web platform”. 

For example, in the image above, collected by Ramani Huria and now available as a free and open licence, shows drains, power lines and the road, among many other features. Expanding upon the Missing Maps collaborative digitization, it could be possible for anyone to digitise these features and have the underlying data available in OpenStreetMap

Additionally, Geoffrey talked about Maptime Tanzania, which he described as an open learning environment for all levels and degrees of knowledge, supporting mappers and all those interested in learning new mapping technology and skills.

In the final session, a walkthrough session for the HOT Tasking Manager was done to get the audience familiar with the tool. “Task #1120 – Missing Maps: Dar es Salaam (drone imagery)” was picked as the area of focus. The areas have been mapped by Ramani Huria during the mapping activities and remote mapping sessions. 

The next mapping party will take place on 22nd August 2015 at Buni. The theme of this mapping party will be ‘Map My Hometown on OSM’ #MMHOSM. In this session, mappers will be grouped to remote map their hometown’s region. The goal for the mapping party is to have this data available on OpenStreetMap for future social-economic development. The mapping party is open to all who are interested in mapping their community and will run from 10 am-1 pm. Updates will be posted on the Facebook event page.