Das Weiße Haus schreibt: „Citizen cartographers joined the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and Office of Digital Strategy for the first-ever White House Mapathon. In just three hours, more than 80 mappers edited more than 400 roads and 1,000 buildings in OpenStreetMap, and collected power outage info on 152 power utilities. The mapathon focused on three main projects: humanitarian mapping efforts, mapping U.S. parks, and power outage mapping.
Open or crowdsourced mapping
At the event, participants came together in support of open mapping initiatives. Open mapping, or crowdsourced mapping, describes how millions of people are using a wiki-like approach to contribute to maps of the world and creating shared geo data layers.
Recognizing the power that projects like these have to educate, engage, and empower the public to apply their curiosity and contribute their talents to a wide range of scientific and societal problems, President Obama called on Federal agencies in 2013 in the Second Open Government National Action Plan to accelerate and scale the use of citizen science and crowdsourcing projects.
Crowdsourcing and open mapping can be applied to a vast range of topic areas. At the Mapathon, participants collaborated to add to the Nepal map and also mapped:
The Peace Corps’ public health programs in Botswana.
Sustainable, disaster-resilient development in the Philippines.
Trails and facilities in parks for the Department of Interior’s Every Kid in a Park initiative.
Details on power companies’ service areas and outage information with the Department of Energy’s Power Service Area Mapping project.
Additional opportunities for mapping
The Police Data Initiative, where contributors can identify, classify, and map available data sets from law enforcement agencies around the country to increase transparency and build trust between law enforcement and their communities
City SDK (software development kit), where mappers can identify innovation spaces and other collaborative workspaces within communities for the public to foster science, technology, engineering, arts, and math for young people and help workers learn new job skills.”
Sources:
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHQh68bXDqg
https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2015/05/28/citizen-cartographers-unite-r...
https://twitter.com/hashtag/WHMapathon?src=hash
