Great job everyone. Sorry the leaderboards were down again Missing Maps is just too popular for our servers to keep up :)

@pnorman we use the X if you are capturing still there isn’t really a difference.

@Kretzer the photo above is from a major connecting road that is currently tagged highway=secondary!! The roads types/quality in africa doesn’t compare to developed places. This road is basically impassible during rainy season further complicating things.

Thanks @GOwin and @PlaneMad these are exactly the use cases that we have in mind.

@SimonPoole The idea that we are developing a sub-culture is kinda silly. We are using, improving, and contributing back to many existing OSM libraries while creating a new tool chain that makes OSM accessible to many more people. We are in active talks with the relevant developers of the projects we need to improve. We are doing everything in the open and inviting feedback. As this diary shows. Once the project is complete anyone will be able to run the offline stack for a humanitarian deployment or a neighborhood mapping party.

We love JOSM, its our go to tool for OSM editing. But have you ever lead a mapping effort over several days with multiple contributors in the field without reliable internet. JOSM isn’t the right tool to handle all of that. You need a full OSM stack replacement. We are working on a diagram that shows how all of this fits together and JOSM and offline iD are important parts to it. Vespucci is a good enough tool but it simply doesn’t our mapping needs.

Conflicts are on our mind for sure. As someone that often does field edits with mapping teams (20k) a day conflicts are not something to mess around with. Our hope is that we are building a smart way human moderated way to deal with the conflicts that arise. We are not proposing no go zones. Honestly, in the areas where we will be mapping to start the frequency of mapping is extremely low and mostly consists of large country and continent wide imports.

Feel free to let me know if you have more questions. I’ll try and answer as the development progresses.

@RobJN great question.

The goal for this project is to have both small server, about the size of a few iPhones stacked on top of each other that can be purchased that will have everything that you need to run OSM offline and then sync it back with the main OSM. We will also release all of the source code and build instructions so anyone with a little technical capabilities can deploy it on their own laptop or other similar device.

For reference we are working towards making it work on two different small servers, Intel NUC and the soon to be released BRCK+Pi

We are also overhauling the OpenMapKit website to make it easier for anyone to create and manage OMK surveys for any kind of field mapping.

Love the analysis. I think its important to note that Missing Maps was officially launched at the beginning of November. Given our monthly mapathons in the last six months I bet that our retention rate and speed is only getting better while still attracting more first time users.

Would really like to see this same analysis done over a full year of Missing Maps, especially given that Ebola and the Nepal earthquake were both significant events.

Thanks.

I think that maps and open data have a huge role to play in areas of conflict and tough government situations. It all goes back to the core ethics of OSM, local knowledge always trumps remote knowledge. It is up to local community member how best to map their communities and even to map or not. I do hope that HOT is able to support those communities when they do decide to map themselves.

Pete, This looks super awesome and exactly what we need for our remote/offline workflow. We should add this into the upcoming field papers discussion.

Joseph and Mark Great points and questions.

There are some minor financial dealings between HOT and ARC mostly connected to Missing Maps. I would be more than willing to recuse myself from any ARC/HOT discussions about any financial transactions.

This issue is an important one to note now in the daylight before any potential conflicts arise. I have received the word from ARC that its ok for me to be on the board given the above condition is met. When I spoke of governance this is one of the areas I mean. We need mechanisms in place that allow partners to especially strategic partners such as the Red Cross to be able to help guide HOT without the membership worrying about possible conflicts. I 100% agree with Mark that having more partners on the board is important for the overall health and growth of HOT.