Herding Cats 2023

Training, coordinating, and validating intern mapping with the OpenStreetMap Tasking Manager

❤️

Kendall County loves OpenStreetMap!

We are corporate members of the OpenStreetMap Foundation, and regularly contribute to and make use of the data.

We have an ambitious (some might say unrealistic) goal: to make Kendall County one of the best-mapped places in OSM. Let’s map everything!

We had three interns this summer, and we thought this could make a nice “filler” task for them in between projects or when they needed a break from whatever task they were working on.

But we had a few issues:

1. Our interns had very little incoming GIS knowledge.
2. Our interns has no OpenStreetMap knowledge.
3. Just saying “map everything in the county” isn’t exactly helpful.

So, how do you onboard new users, organize their work, and validate it after the fact?

Well, you don’t reinvent the wheel. We used the OpenStreetMap Tasking Manager!

The first thing to do is separate your activities into specific campaigns. “Map all the buildings” sounds a little more doable. For each campaign, you can write up clear instructions, expectations, and then share the campaign with your users (or open it up to the public).

But it’s the “task management” that really makes this tool great. Once you have your campaign set up, you define an area of interest and a grid of “tasks” is laid over it. You can set the size of the grid squares, or even provide your own shapes instead.

Once you publish the campaign, your users can call “dibs” on individual squares, follow the instructions, and mark that area as complete.

Core staff can then go and validate that work, confirming that the work is done, or that it needs more information. In either case, comments can be left on the task for the user to review.

To give you an idea of what it looks like in practice, here’s the Tasking Manager interface. This shows you the different tasks in the “buildings” campaign, and you can see mapped (blue) and validated (green) areas.

This also shows another feature of the system: when a task cell seems overwhelming, a user can, at the click of a button, split the cell in 4 equal parts. You can do it multiple times, until the task feels manageable.

When you’re working on a task, if you use the web-based OSM editor, it is embedded directly in the site, letting you see your work alongside the task instructions.

22,800 buildings

460 miles of sidewalk

So, did it work? You better believe it!

Our interns added over 22800 buildings and 460 linear miles of sidewalk.