The latest #MapLesotho project push began on 4 January. Project participants have been asked to adopt a new role - that of validator. They have been asked to move from creators working with blank sheets as part of a team dedicated to common purpose, to modifiers and correctors acting at a coaching level.

I think it’s all about wearing hats that bring a different perspective to bear on the task. I guess the hats are kind of like Augmented Reality goggles that change the way you approach cartography.

One thing that really stays the same right across all three tasks is trying to keep in mind potential users when you are mapping. Part of the learning from the varied experiences has been the importance of care and craft when mapping - imagining the real-ifs situations where someone might put your traces to use. When I am tracing a path through the woods, I realise that I am approaching from a God’s eye perspective and it might be a matter of someone not being able to see the larger path for all the trees - but I can and want to make that available. It may be indicating a ford (or potential washout) on a road surface - I see a vehicle coming around a true with diminished visibility but access to an OSM driven sat nav that might make them aware of the road conditions ahead.

Starting on 4 January, #MapLesotho has been focussed on making the best possible map through an exciting and hyperactive re-validation exercise. At the outset, of the three tasks undertaken as part of this project, there were over 2,000 tiles remaining to be validated. To spur efforts a 30 day contest was devised to incent and focus efforts on improving and ensuring top quality mapping. As one of the judges (along with @DaBigC, @DaCor, GeoFrizz and @RustyB) I have moved to this third perspective on the OSM craft. It is a real mind shift and the first few days have illuminated unforeseen challenges for us as well as the mapper come validators.

The first challenge for me was agreeing to use WhatsApp for communication. It is perfectly suited to this task and does permit fluid and timely communication between judges as well as feedback to participants on two parallel channels. I have eschewed the service for personal uses as I find the chatter distracting - it even ‘realer-time’ Facebook. Just not something I need, but I will grudgingly admit it really works for this task. It works very nicely hand in hand with personal messaging within OSM itself. Feedback is essential to this process as everyone is called upon to change their mapping perspectives and agendas and this is a very individual change. Everyone moves at their own pace in adapting and come at it from their own perspectives. Feedback is essential to the process.

The process we are developing to judge the quality of tile validation is multi-step: 1. Are all the main elements there? 2. Are the specific task objectives covered? 3. Moving to a more granular level - are those tasks accomplished well? - this is measured. 4. Feedback the results of the adjudication to enable refinement and resubmission or gentle learning by succeeding with some lessons for the next task.

When I became involved with this project, the mapping tasks with being able to abstract what was visible on the satellite imagery to symbolic representation was a major mind bend. It involved a lot of experimentation, a lot of correction and simple experience working alongside a group of collaborators with varied experience and perspectives themselves. It involved being open to correction, to receiving shared knowledge and being able to reciprocate in time oneself. There’s a big cultural task in this and this requires adapting one’s own perceived ways of interacting to new circumstances. It’s called collaboration but this involves realising that every collaborates in their own ways and to remain fluid and open in one’s own perceptions.

Sharing one’s own knowledge and applying some expertise in the process become essential to validation. Making a judgement on how much one corrects as opposed to simply instructing or even rejecting calls for a deft hand. I have benefited from gentle instruction for many other mappers and hope that those on the receiving end of my own feedback have felt it appropriate and useful themselves. Validating others work is a great way to improve you own though (especially for those that learn by observation or backward engineering of a task).

Becoming a judge of others validation attempts is an entirely new perspective. It calls for technical appreciation and application, but also appreciation of the processes underway. Observation of statistics that reflect the underlying tasks hint at different individuals’ approach to a similar task. These suggest their own agendas or efforts and are taken into account as much as the technical veracity of a task - we are all human.

Over the past few days we have watched the evolution of mappers into evolving validators. Clearly there is a significant challenge in being able to shift one’s perspective away from blanket coverage by creation to thoughtful modification and refinement of others’ work. This probably shares some similarity with the iterative refinement process of user generated content in Wikipedia but as much as mappers have been doing UGC it has been solo on a team. Now we are asking people to move to more of a coach role. In reality not everyone can coach, nor do they want to. People’s perceptions of belonging to a team are also very individual in terms of what that entails. We are now seeing the result of these individual variations as everyone attempts to undertake similar tasks. There is tremendous variation in the adaptation to this new role.

It’s early days so the next few weeks will teach us a lot about this transition and about what we can expect as semi-final output. Stay tuned. Results are updated hourly and appear at: http://maplesotho.cbroderick.me/comp.html.

As I work away at the #MapLesotho initiative (there’s a 48 marathon happening as I write) I am also rather proud/gratified/thrilled to have finished grading about 60 assignments submitted by my BA and MA classes in Digital Arts in Humanities at University College Cork.

The second assignment for both this year was to participate in a choice of OpenStreetMap initiatives. The first was simply to get their feet wet working with their own neighbourhood. For the more adventuresome I introduced the #MapLesotho option. For those looking for a real challenge I set a couple of them working in the Irish Townlands Mapping Project which extended OpenStreetMap editing to use of MapWarper and a few intermediary tools adding a temporal challenge to their work.

Following some lectures to attempt to impart not just skills but an appreciation of the implication of the tasks that were being undertaken I was hugely gratified by the unique, creative and simply outstanding reflections that they submitted. They got it! and ran with the challenge.

I am not trying to figure out how I might share some of these exemplary projects. They currently exist on a variety of class blogs that I hope I might point to and reward the superb efforts and spread the word. It’s a great experience to be a part of the realisations, discoveries and community engagement that took place and I have to say great pride in the passionate efforts of the students.

Stumbled on http://tasks.hotosm.org/project/938 this am. Call for maximum participation on a small but important task to aid MSF. Was gratifying to be able to switch a few cycles from other tasks and be able to contribute. 100% complete within 10 hours and validation now under way. The power of collaboration and tasksharing.

As we draw close to 100% on the Rural Lesotho Task in the #MapLesotho initiative I find myself filled with very strong reaffirmation of the power of community and the many implicit and explicit benefits and values of crowdsourced engagement.

On the 16th of January at Fingal County Hall I participated in my third marathon for the #MapLesotho project. There was a full house for this event with the organiser working his usual magic to get involvement from a collection of fifth year students from a number of schools in the area as well as publicly minded volunteers who have been involved in this specific project or associated ones around Open Street Map. We were joined by volunteers participating from around the world: Canada, the US, Germany and of course stalwarts in Lesotho itself, to name a few identifiable ones. As we were closing in on having a publicly available, robust, complete basemap for the eastern half of Lesotho this day witnessed not just the completion of nearly 10% of the task but more importantly the infectious sharing of enthusiasm for the project and its ethos amongst all attending. As we all shared our own reasons for why and how we do what we do and what we have learned from the project, I watched those newly engaged lightening up with their own enthusiasm for the project, imagining what else might be accomplished with the raw mapping materials and being positive about what they themselves can contribute. It was truly striking and wonderfully energising to feel the positive energy in the room, on interaction through twitter and demonstrated most concretely by the placing of nodes and progress towards tasks.

I was privileged to work with some new converts to the cause and help them get them started with OpenStreetMap - what was involved, what tools were available and then to let them take it for themselves. They embraced the challenge with vigour and I was particularly impressed by how they helped one another as they got going and shared their own newly acquired skills with others. As the students around me moved along they gained in confidence and shared their experience helping each other along the way.

I had a number of thoughtful conversation with a particular student beside me who was helping his own colleague move from using IDEditor to JOSM aided by his own infectious enthusiasm for what the tool afforded him. He shared with me his reason for doing what he does and it cannot be expressed any more clearly: he gives of his time to help others help themselves. As he said this is not charity, this is enablement - it is starting a process that grows with its own generated synergy.

This is #MapLesotho. The achievements continue build and to speak for themselves.

A small cadre convened at the Lesotho Embassy in Dublin on Saturday 30 August to focus on keeping up the momentum on this great initiative. Facilities were graciously provided by the embassy and we were hard at work in short order. Hot Task Manager remains a superb tool for keeping the team directed and also providing motivating progress feedback. A rapid, round the room decision was made to focus on the rural task and attempt to move that one forward in a concentrated effort. We were challenged with some network connectivity issues that emerged during the process which conveniently divided efforts between editing and validating based on technological affordances. This arose as IDEditor seemed to place demands on the firewall and the OSM API that prevented certain participants from bei able to get feature updates in real time. Lesson: test all components of the process in situ in advance whenever possible to identify such limitations. As it was it probably was serendipitously beneficial to the process. Through a supremely solid effort we succeeded in breaking the 30% task accomplished threshold. Additionally we had 4% of the overall task validated as well.

I was out to Fingal County Council’s offices on 25 July along with 25 odd volunteers to participate in the world-wide challenge to build the OSM data for Lesotho. I was most pleased to decided to use ID Editor. I am used to JOSM (A very fine tool) but was won over by the simplicity of ID for the task at hand. I fear I had not tried it in the past few years probably experiencing some discomfort with the older Flash-based tool. No longer. Great implementation and superbly intuitive. I was also usefully situated next to the Ambassador from Lesotho would gave me some great perspective from on the ground - those things that look like the top of Canadian silos? Those be huts. Brilliant!

OSM HotTask is also a superb tool. It really makes collaborative marathons smooth, well focused and intuitive to newbies as well as veterans. One of the most impressive aspects? The ability to break an assigned task into more manageable components when you realise you have been over ambitious. It really helps to make things seem more achievable and give you the sense that you are accomplishing tasks and keep great forward momentum. I learn there has been great progress on #maplesotho and the good work continues.

So, to simply put it out there - Twitter doesn’t lie - decided to make a dry run to Fingal County Council to participate in the Lesotho Mapathon. Found the right place to be, just managed to be off by a week. Ahhh well…now I know the bus route, the peculiarities (ie where the stop request button is - where to get some porridge) and all set to be there next week. Looking forward to some African mapping.