Chaos Computer Club - archive feed

Through open mapping, we hope to inspire local youths and leaders to use technology to improve and create sustainable local governance system. We engaged 44 youths from 3 municipalities to participate in open mapping in first phase. In second phase, we gathered 10 IT officials from province 2 and highlighted OSM to connect geospatial elements for better local-level administration.

Here, we will discuss our methodological framework, challenges, how we gained support from local units to coordinate with community youth, and impacts we successfully created. This talk will be relevant to those interested in laying a strong foundation not only for better governance but also for engaging youths.

The success of local governments in meeting development targets is crucial for the goals of federalism in Nepal. The local governments have a colossal opportunity to set the course of development based on people’s aspirations, as citizens have increased power and responsibility to choose and act on their agenda in the federal system. However, these governments face daunting challenges in human, capital, and other resource constraints. Innovative citizen-centric approaches are necessary to navigate these challenges to achieve the development goals. It is also imperative to note that properly achieving the development goals and measuring their progress is contingent on decision making and planning, driven by data. Geospatial data is valuable to the local economy and community in various aspects. The openness of the information, or more specifically the freedom to access and use such open data, is crucial to achieving such multiplier effects of taxpayer-funded data generation processes.

So hereby, our interest lies in training and encouraging local youths and leaders to leverage technology for good governance through open mapping in coordination with local administrative units. Our initiative looks beyond the myopic vision of training a handful of youth on digital mapping to create a limited number of outputs, i.e. maps. We implemented a mechanism in which we created a batch of OpenStreetMap (OSM) leaders, who in their regions, can inspire and enable such processes beyond the life of any particular project. As such, we wanted to set in motion a process that can beget far-reaching, longer-term benefits in the form of active citizenry (on the youths’ part) and data-driven development (on the local governments’ part). This will be in addition to the immediate, short-term outputs such as up-to-date maps and enhanced mapping skills of the mappers.

In the first phase, KLL trained 44 citizens from 3 local bodies in the use of OSM and mapping in coordination with the municipality. The trained youths were also involved field data collection. Simultaneously, we started remotely mapping the municipality. Based on the need, we collected field data to complete the map. On mutual interests and availability of resources, the mapping of the local governments included points of interest like: Roads, Settlements, Educational institutions, Health facilities, Government offices, Banking institutions and others as agreed upon by the municipalities. Using the data hence collected, we created softcopies and hard copies of ward (smaller administrative unit of government in Nepal) level and municipality level maps and handed them over to the municipalities for their use.

In the second phase, to ensure better understanding of OSM within the local governments, we trained 10 IT officers from Province 2 on OpenStreetMap, its uses and applications in local governance. We also led a focused group discussion on how open mapping can be utilised by municipalities, what features need to be mapped for the integration of OSM in local governance and challenges they foresee in this process.

Hence, we will be discussing our methodological framework and challenges in involving local youths and leaders in open mapping and in contributing to develop more promising local level governance. We will also share how we gained needed support from the local units to coordinate with the youth of the community and the impacts we successfully created. This talk will be relevant to those interested in laying a strong foundation not only for good governance with the core idea of open mapping and its application at its center but also for involving local youth in the process.

about this event: https://2022.stateofthemap.org/sessions/FABJFJ/

The OSM data model with its nodes, ways, and relations has done an amazing job for us over the years. It has seen very little changes since relations were introduced 15 years ago. But there are some real problems with the data model. With the experience of those 15 years behind us, its time to tackle some improvements.

This talk will outline the problems with the data model, show ideas for improvements, and discuss possible ways that can move us forward step by step.

The OSM data model is quite different from the "Simple Feature" data model used by most "geo" software. It has some great features, like the open tagging model, which has proven to be a great enabler for all sorts of innovations. But the data model also has its problems. Most often named are the missing area data type and the cumbersome geometry building needed for ways and relations based on their member nodes. This makes use of the OSM data more difficult, more expensive, and slower than it needs to be.

There has been some discussions on these topics over the years, mostly after my talk in 2018 at the SotM in Milano, but work on this has stalled. Recently the OSMF Engineering Working Group has taken up this topic and payed me to do a study on the problems with the data model and possible ways forward. This talk will present the findings and should jumpstart the discussions around this in the OSM community.

about this event: https://2022.stateofthemap.org/sessions/W3AGY8/

We would like to share our feedback on facilitating OSM participatory mapping workshops for climate change adaptation projects with OSM local communities

Since 2015, CartONG has been expanding its work into the domain of participatory mapping, first by partnering with the international Missing Maps project, and then by working to develop a wider set of tools and methodologies.

Over the last 12 months, we had the opportunity to support two climate change adaptation projects, one in Tajikistan for the German Corporation for International Cooperation (GIZ) and the other in Madagascar in the Morombe region for Secours Islamique France.

For these projects, we used geographic data and open source technologies, especially OpenStreetMap, and based on a participatory approach by mobilizing and fully involving local communities. We also worked to promote cooperation between the different actors in the region.

At this conference, we want to share our field experience and approaches to increase the production and availability of geographic data in the concerned regions and initiate new groups of local contributors to enhance and maintain the OpenStreetMap database.

about this event: https://2022.stateofthemap.org/sessions/N9VWB9/

Understanding the limitations of data is hard.

Some tags are missing, and some tend to be present only when others are. Is the missing tag saying something, is it just unknown? When tags take yes/no values, is a missing tag an implicit "no", maybe the tag "does not apply", or something else…?

This talk doesn’t have answers. It’s the journey we took through an investigation of road data in London. What we found, what we think about what we found, and ideas of things to compute and visualise, before performing an analysis - or to decide if the data is just not suitable for this analysis.

about this event: https://2022.stateofthemap.org/sessions/HZUFPQ/

Lightning talks

## AddressForAll Institute

_by Thierry Jean_

## ImproveOSM new data dumps

_by Beata Tautan-Jancso_

The ImproveOSM platform is a suite of tools to share various mapping tasks containing potentially missing one-way tags, turn restrictions, and roads from the OpenStreetMap. The ImproveOSM data is also available as frequent data dumps in CSV format.

## Geohash plugin

_by Beata Tautan-Jancso, Nicoleta Viregan_

Geohash is a plugin available in the JOSM tool, which comes to be handy for some of you who work in precise areas based on geohash units. The plugin displays a layer of grids on top of the map layer. In addition to the visualization feature, the plugin offers extra functionalities, and this talk aims to emphasize the diverse usages of this tool.

about this event: https://2022.stateofthemap.org/sessions/ZVLDMZ/

OpenStreetMap consists of tagged nodes, ways and relations. Many use cases of geographic data, however, need a tabular dataset of points, lines and polygons. Processing OSM into derivative datasets is a crucial task that can benefit from new tools and formats. This talk will cover several topics around this theme, including:

* Existing approaches such as the Export Tool

* Why FlatGeobuf is a suitable forwards-thinking format

* Computational challenges for processing global-scale relations

* A new open-source program, Protoshapes, to generate admin polygons in FlatGeobuf format

* Efficient approaches for global datasets such as coastlines, oceans, and road connectivity

* Frequently updating datasets using the open-source OSM Express database

about this event: https://2022.stateofthemap.org/sessions/VXECJQ/

Usability testing can be done without hordes of users to observe, in fact just three people is likely to give very useful hints.

And it is almost certainly more useful than expected, and your software is likely not as good as you expect.

This is based on my experience with using user testing while developing StreetComplete.

about this event: https://2022.stateofthemap.org/sessions/EHZQXV/

Boundary conflation is a sensitive and difficult problem to solve. When administrative boundary data is available from authoritative sources for OSM, it is imperative that we have the ability to analyze boundaries for import and deduce if conflation with OSM ways can be done hopefully in a semi-automatic fashion. "Admin Boundary Conflation" is a special-purpose tool made for the purpose and this talk will introduce the workings of the tool to the audience along with the various output statistics available during the process. Currently, the tool is utilized for reporting geometric area differences of 0.01% in the 99th percentile of 5000 municipalities in Serbia within 20 minutes.

about this event: https://2022.stateofthemap.org/sessions/HGFY7Z/

Presentation of the work we've done to adapt the OSM Carto style to vector tiles. We will take you through the making-of the cartography, step by step, scale by scale.

Available on MapTiler Cloud (https://cloud.maptiler.com/maps/openstreetmap/), the style will be integrated into the next version of the OpenMapTiles project.

We will also show you how to use this style in QGIS and how to display it on 3D maps with MapLibre.

about this event: https://2022.stateofthemap.org/sessions/3EREXZ/

By 2025, HOT aims that communities in 94 countries vulnerable to disaster or experiencing multidimensional poverty are equipped and able to map the locations where they live and work. We believe that accessible mobile mapping tools are key to this effort. Since I started working for HOT in January 2022, I have done informal interviews, observations, focus groups and experiments with more than 100 regional users, primarily in East Africa, looking at the accessibility of current OSM mobile editing tools. Sharing this research with the wider community will help everyone build technology that fits the needs on the ground.

For 3 months, with the support of OpenMap Development Tanzania (OMDTZ) and the State University of Zanzibar (SUZA) Youth Mappers, I did a variety of informal interviews, observations, focus groups, and experiments with individuals and local OpenMapping organizations, primarily in East Africa. My research included professional data collection campaigns, as well as entry-level community members whose first encounter of OSM was during one of my workshops.

While the majority of my research focused on 5 main Open Source applications that are already in widespread use (StreetComplete, OsmAnd, Organic Maps, Vespucci & ODK Collect), many of the insights gained from this research, including data about hardware availability and current phone use, are applicable to anyone building mapping tools, especially those that will be used in low-resource environments.

The HOT _tech team aims to do more than just talk. Analysis of the research will be followed by specific suggestions for those doing mobile OSM mapping, especially at the entry-level, as well as technical proposals for tooling improvement. We will be working with the existing OSM ecosystem to design and implement these proposals in a way that is inclusive and sustainable.

Feedback is most welcome.

about this event: https://2022.stateofthemap.org/sessions/UWHAME/