Today, the geography departments of 7 Belgian universities organised a national missing map mapathon. We had about 190 subscriptions divided over 7 locations in Ghent, Brussels, Namur, Liège and Leuven. The organizers had contacted the press (written, radio and TV). So after hearing about the mapathon on the radio a few more people show up.

We were lucky enough to find enough experienced mappers to give introductions and help the people in all locations. I had the honor to do that for the session in Ghent. This was my first time, after just helping out on 2 previous missing map parties.

A chat channel was set up so the organisers could stay in contact and around noon we had Pete Masters tuning via Skype to give some background on the projects.

The original plan was to map in Swaziland, but on Thursday Pete asked us whether we could work on South Kivu, because they need a map of this area for teams that leaving on Tuesday for a vaccination program against measles. We were more than willing to switch projects. We started around 10am, and by noon all three tasks were finalized.

In the afternoon we worked on some other projects (among them the original one in Swaziland)

Unfortunately, I cannot give you the final numbers, as I was still helping hope some people that showed up after hearing about the mapathon on the radio. I believe more than 23.000 buildings were mapped during the day. Hopefully someone else will report about this.

We also had a visit from the national TV, and they had a pretty long item in their journal at 1pm.

You can the see the result here (in Dutch). You can also listen to one of the radio interviews.

I would like to thank everybody (mappers, approvers, the universities and the “tutors”) for this wonderful experience. Hope the see you again.