This week, I created a new MapRoulette challenge, called “Massachusetts Schools”.

Thank you Martijn van Exel, and Serge Wroclawski for making it possible (even easy) to add in your own challenges to MapRoulette. I used the loader python script, which requires a postgis database. It was just a couple of hours of fiddling with the SQL statement to make it work. I still hope to make small adjustments to the help and instructions text.

In Massachusetts, most of the schools were imported twice. Once from the national GNIS database import, and a second time from a statewide MassGIS data set. Both imported data sets are old and are getting stale. A surprising number of schools have moved, closed, or changed names since the data was imported. The schools need some attention.

Hopefully over the next 2 years, we will get them cleaned up.

We also plan on using this challenge in our local OSM OpenStreetMap-Boston meetup