Since May, members of the 1st Harwell Explorer Scout Unit have been working on mapping areas of the world that don’t have free maps available for everyone.
We have been doing this through the humanitarian aid program, Humanitarian Open Street Map, working alongside international charities to help disaster management, reduce risk and help meet sustainable management goals by taking a part of our weekly meeting and finding an area of the world that is in need of better maps and simply mapping.
The Open Street Maps website is used by volunteers to update and increase the accuracy and amount of data show on lesser-known areas of land.
And while this information has had a great impact on those who benefit from the maps, more needs to be done to finish these maps worldwide. One way to do this is to volunteer and take a small amount of time to use existing maps and create better ones, that may miss the finer details like blocked areas.
How can we help?
We are running a virtual mapathon on Saturday 24th October from 11:00 am, to work on areas of the world in need. We hope to inform and teach people on how this works, how anyone can help the project and we hope to encourage a new group of mappers to support this worldwide mapping project.
This event is open to members of the Scouting movement from all over the world. Your families are welcome to join in as well!
The event will start with a Zoom meeting where we will teach you about Missing Maps and how to use the HOT OSM software to support the project.
We will then be on hand until 4:00 pm to provide support if you get stuck as you learn.
Don’t forget to use the #HarwellMaps and #Scouts hashtags when you save you changes – this will then contribute to our project and will show how much we have achieved as a team and can be viewed on the Leader Board below!
What’s our task?
COVID-19 Response in the PALAPYE DISTRICT in Botswana.
The task is to map all the buildings in this area.
Here is the task – https://tasks.hotosm.org/projects/9582/tasks/
We started the day with most of this square still showing as white ‘Available for mapping’, but thanks to the hard work of everyone involved, it looked like this at 1630 – with the leader board showing that we have completed over 4150 edits!
Please keep working away at this task over the next few days – it would be great to see it completely filled in!
Thanks for supporting our day!
Leader Board
Find out how we are getting on – Check out the leader board
Get ready for our Mapathon
To get the most out of the day, it would be great if you could register for your Open Street Map and HOT Tasking Manager accounts before we start.
Please watch this short video to explain how to do this!
Our team is available to help you, should you have any questions about how to complete a mapping task. You can either e-mail us here or join back to the Zoom call and we will do our best to help you!
Back to TopNeed some help?
Got a question? No problem, either fill out the form below or join back to the Zoom call and we will get back to you as soon as possible!
