A mapathon is an event where participants contribute to an open source map. Mapathons are generally done for relief purposes. The public is invited to make improvements in a pre-selected geographical area to improve coverage and to help disaster relief workers asses risk and plan accordingly. Several online tools facilitate mapathons, like the HOT Tasking Manager used as an example in this guide.
When a hurricane or an earthquake strikes, mapathons become a valuable tool to help ground responders from afar. Libraries, universities, colleges, digital labs, and similar groups are perfect organizations to help translate the good will of many volunteers into data that can save lives. The event in turn becomes a way to open the door to the work that your digital team does outside urgencies. The same techniques used to map disaster zones—drawing and verifying geometries on a raster image—are used to do other types of cultural and scientific work, for example.
Learn more at Missing Maps.
A mapathon can bring substantial positive attention to your office, and help you build many connections around your campus. A mapathon, in turn, can benefit from full institutional support and your help. If you are a top-administrator, you can use this framework to help you create your own preparedness plan for mapathons suited to your local environment. The most important job you can do is to make sure that the top-level communication channels of the university are available to the organizers to help fill the rooms with volunteers.
Something else you should consider is giving the option to a large number of your staff to participate in the event. Not only will this increase the amount of relief data, this is bound to increase morale in your institution.
You don’t have to wait until disaster hits to begin preparations for your institution and your team. Here are some of the things you can do to react more efficiently the day that disaster does strike, and you want to help out:
Rooms: Do a survey of the rooms available to you that are amenable for mapathons. Depending on your public, you might want to identify rooms that have a combination of PCs and tables for laptops; others might be better served by a large room with tables or desks for laptops alone. Keep the list of those rooms easily accessible. Make sure the rooms have a good amount of outlets and good Internet. You can supplement with extension chords.
Communications: Talk to your communications team to see what kinds of rapid-response capacity they have. Make sure the university’s top communication team is also ready to help you fill the room(s). Identify what networks are available to you or your team directly on social media or email, and keep a list. Prepare a template for a mapathon poster and have that ready. We recommend you design for respect for the gravity of the situation without sacrificing attention-grabbing.
Skills: Many academic institutions and labs have one or several GIS specialists on staff. Identify who they are and make sure to talk to them to gage their own readiness to teach beginners how to use the tool. If a GIS specialist is not on hand, identify technologists who are willing to research and learn how to use the tool.
If everything is in place the following steps can be deployed in 6-7 days.
A project is only partially complete once a preliminary open source map has been made. Any mapping project on Open Street Maps, for example, goes through two phases before it is considered complete and made public:
The former requires only basic skills and is easily suitable for a mapathon. The OSM documentation suggests that you need to be experienced for the latter, but beginners can still usefully participate in the validation process by pinpointing particular parts of the review process and marking your work for the review of other experienced users. Even if your event happens once the mapping phase is mostly complete, your team can help carry the project to completion by working on this quality control portion of the process.
See the resources below for tutorials on how to incorporate validation into your mapathon.
We welcome your feedback. If you have ideas on how to improve this model, don’t hesitate to contribute.
