Category Archives: Mapping

OpenStreetMap: OpenStreetMap is the ‘wiki-map’ which is jointly-owned by the people of the world. It depends on the digital revolution to empower people within their own communities to take control of how they are represented, mapped, and seen by the outside world. The project finds its heart not in the technology or tools it uses, or commercially interested organisations backing it, but in the Open Street Map itself, the publicly owned wiki-style platform, accessible to anyone via Smartphone or Computer, to edit, use or develop.

It is a transparent, cost-neutral project by which donors can engage and collaborate with their field counterparts, giving time rather than money to support the production of commonly owned visualisations from satellite and field data. This enables the delivery of humanitarian assistance in the form of engineering, medical, and cultural intervention, in areas generally considered ‘inaccessible’ and ‘precarious’.

Potentially, it changes everything.

Mapping Crisis book launch

Mapping Crisis: Participation, Datafication and Humanitarianism in the Age of Digital Mapping (University of London/Chicago Press, Human Rights Consortium) Editor: Doug Specht.

Who knew that a book about personal data ethics, track and trace, government handling of life-saving disaster mapping data would become so topical? 

Deo coaching new OSM members taken from surrounding neighbourhoods

My contribution is the final chapter, ‘Modalities of United Statelessness’: about bottom-up, ‘hyper-local’, community-owned motorcycle-mapping data in Uganda’s ongoing refugee crisis. Local Ugandans and international refugees together ‘wiki-mapped’ disease outbreak and social protection data, in the Congolese/South Sudanese refugee settlement areas. 

As members of the Ugandan Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, they adopted OpenStreetMap usernames. Then, using their own android phones, created a trailblazing resource of life-saving health, food, and water map data, now broadly used by UN, NGO, and Government emergency and development coordinators. 

Humanitarians being part of ‘the solution’, rather than part of ‘the problem’. 

Live Map Data
Live Map Data (Credit: Kobo Toolbox/Kobo Collect)

I argue  this valuable ‘Data Preparedness’ to be a solution to many pandemic issues, and this view seems borne out by Uganda’s excellent COVID-19 record to date.

Chapter Abstract Here: Modalities of United Statelessness

….
I’d love if it got way beyond just academic community, as scholarship on the politics of representation and contemporary humanitarian ethics is scant, but really really important. 

I liked this bit of the blurb, finding it particularly topical for the current times:

‘….Some have argued that representation has diminished in humanitarian crises as people are increasingly reduced to data points. In turn, this data has become ever more difficult to analyse without vast computing power, leading to a dependency on the old colonial powers to refine the data collected from people in crisis, before selling it back to them.’

Book also available through Open Access.

Refugee Community Motorcycle Mapping, South Sudan Border Regions

Tents as far as the eye can see…

Introduction
As Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Uganda, our presence in the country involves two arms of activity which are the benchmark of the OpenStreetMap democratic ethos. These are Capacity-Building (Training) and Data Collection (Mapping). The partnership with USSD allows us to strongly pursue these aims in with significant impact, amongst refugee and host communities in Northern Uganda.

We train partners and community members in the tools of OpenStreetMap (OSM), a global online ‘wiki’ map empowering under-served communities in technological skills, and increasingly used for humanitarian relief. These participants have local knowledge and techniques which they can bring to the mapping process, giving ground-level information about how their communities are served for amenities.

During the month of November and early December, HOT conducted field training, classroom training, and field-mapping amongst communities in the Refugee-Hosting communities of the Arua District. This is part of an ongoing HOT project, funded by the US State Department, called ‘Crowd-Sourcing Non-Settlement Refugee Data’, and locally referred-to as ‘HOT Uganda Community Mapping’. The project aims to identify Key Geo-Spatial Indicators of need and resilience amongst and between Refugee Settlements and Hosting Communities. Click HERE for some interactive OSM maps of our work in Arua District.

Background
This is a report on the first three weeks of field mapping operations in Arua, the first of the northern districts of Uganda which HOT intends to map. Arua has a complex refugee community where refugees live in settlements as well as amongst the community.
The management of this project, to which partners and even community members are encouraged to contribute, focuses on the collaborative integration of different datasets. These are across sectors and agencies, and are all brought into an openly-shared resource: OpenStreetMap. Data is mainly collected through lightweight Open Source Smartphone apps. We teach users to install the apps, design surveys, and use them in the field. The outcomes are both data-collection and ongoing support in the use, sharing, and manipulation of that data.

Project Objectives
1) Data collection: To ensure transparent and coordinated service provision through authenticity and collaboration with local communities.
2) Capacity-Building: To initiate a two-fold approach of enabling partners across sectors to adopt OpenStreetMap conventions, methods and tools into their own workflows (by training and ongoing support) and by initiating field-mapping data collection at community level, engaging members of both Refugee and Hosting communities on the ground.
3) Sustainability: to Create a Pilot Model for Ongoing Work. Because of the way community mapping can give a field intimacy missed by ‘top-down’ NGO ‘partner’ surveys, we can show a very granular technique for accountability and gaps in critical service. There are many agencies in Uganda who recognise the need for this. This project aims to showcase this technique.

Mapping Objectives
Goal: Field Mapping of Camp and Non-Camp Refugees in all hosting sub-counties, to record Geo-Spatial Indicators of gaps in service-provision to precarious communities.
How:
Universally Conventional Map resource creation
Data collected: Community Characteristics (Population, Movement, WASH, Health, Education, CBI, SGBV Risk Indicators, Refugee Livelihood and Movement.

Training in the Community:

The first training day, held in the field at Omugo Subcounty Offices, was used as a training in data collection and as a Surveyor selection process. All the usual challenges of Field Mapathons were expected and encountered, including generator and ‘MS Windows’ issues, water and rural access to WiFi (mass Smartphone tethering used, as the most secure, contingent and accessible method).


HOT Uganda team manager Deogratias Teaching Tasking Manager to Refugees and Locals


Viola (Refugee Community) and Jabo (Hosting Community) editing their own home data in OpenStreetMap iD editor

Participants were introduced to OSM data collection in the context of their own community needs, with the intention that this would build an accurate map which addresses presence of WASH, Education, Healthcare, and Cash-Based Intervention amenities in relation to both host and refugee communities in the district. 55 people participated.


Surveyors Learning OSMAND: how to identify ‘Blue-Dot’ offline Satellite Position on their Smartphones using OSM for Android

25th November 2017, Field Mapping Inception Starts
Data collection was implemented the next day with the selected candidates. This continues to date. Complementing this exercise is the continuation of OSM Open Workshops and Mapathons, which bring GIS professionals together to work and learn side by side with local and refugee community members.


Mapathon: MSF Water & Sanitation Expert mapping in collaboration with community members
The first ongoing feedback event was held on 28th November, for which data collection was suspended, for surveyors to attend. This was conducted, too, in the field, and involved the usual challenges and rewards of field-based mapathons. It demonstrated the field-based inclusive ethos of HOT, and the presence of surveyors and their data clearly cultivated the sharing and integration of data and knowledge between agency and field, and the understanding of the collaborative and field-derived data ethos as a whole. (37 people participated)

Omugo Sub-County Field-Mapping Training – Unusual collaborations between participating agencies

Strategies of data collection continued to evolve, as the twelve data collectors moved around the district in-between this and the next ‘Mapathon Training’, which was hosted at the UNHCR regional office. This is a field feedback session, where surveyors share thoughts on relevance of survey questions, based on field experience and community feedback. They are later taught how to modify and write such Open Source surveys for themselves.

6th December 2017 Mapathon Training, UNHCR Regional Office.
This was a standard OSM training day, tailored for some requests for certain preferred topics and tools. The schedule included Tasking Manager, ODK, KOBO, JOSM, QGIS and Form-Building. All members of the training completed the process of composing a map by the end of the day. Appendix 3 Day Schedule.

UNHCR Training, Arua


All Participants Compose QGIS Map Products of their home environments.


Left to Right: Host Community Member, Refugee, Local Board LC3 Officer, MSF WatSan Officer.

Refugees, Local Community members, and Partners learned tools together in the classroom environment. It was a very rewarding day, fertilised by the field data and mapping experience of the Surveyors, and the cross-referencing of GIS and Data skills which was gathered in the training.

Field Mapping Strategy and Methodology
Mapping strategy is a very important part of the surveying process, as productivity will be halved immediately if progress is not made through an area in a constructive way. A detailed and commonly-understood plan is needed to avoid duplication and repeat surveying, for which local roads need to be known.


A freshly-trained Field Mapper strategising with field-derived community feedback

During the planning phase, we were able to access shapefiles of counties, subcounties, parishes and villages from the Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBOS). This was data which later led to challenges, but was useful to overlay on maps showing settlement shapes (from the UNHCR), and which we used to strategically plan surveyors’ workplans.

Daily Area Coverage – Boundary Shapes Courtesy of Partners: Uganda Bureau of Statistics

The overall map of the area for strategy helped, too, to plan a longer-term strategy. These working maps are consistently printed and used in the field by surveyors. Dark areas denote refugee settlements. Below is an example:


(Map: HOT Uganda. Not for publication)

Motorcycle Mapping
Collaboration takes place through occupational engagement between all participants, and the Motorcycle Riders themselves are encouraged to learn and participate in the process, providing a number of fundamental assets to the table.


Local Boda Knowledge – Riders are involved as team members


‘Hacking’ Motorcycles with Phone Chargers

Training Outcomes
In order to provide the most accurate mapping data which can be accessed both by agencies across sectors and a growing OSM user community, our field mapping content, ground-truthed by the community members themselves, has been interwoven with training in OSM data manipulation and GIS tooling during this time. Mappers from the community have now experienced all aspects of taking data from the ground to the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap, and partners have acknowledged the value and power of the OSM tools and methodolgy.
Locally, refugees habitually now work alongside host-community members in the field (local community surveyors, and local community motorcycle riders), who guide them and translate in non-settlement situations. These Ugandan Nationals themselves learn and interact when navigating/mapping the inside of the settlements.

Michael Yani, Refugee Field Mapper, learning GIS in the UNHCR Compound, Arua

Newly-Established Arua OSM Community.

Since commencement of this phase of ‘Uganda Community Mapping’, we have trained over 75 people in Missing Maps/HOT Field Mapping Techniques, OSM field tools, and desktop GIS and Data-Processing skills.
These people constitute the newly-founded Arua District OSM Community, which has a WhatsApp group by which to communicate, and which is used as a resource for ongoing events. 16 of these members were selected for field-mapping in the district, and consist of six Refugee Community members, five Local Hosting-Community Members (Ugandan Nationals), and five independent partner members (from MSF/France and CARE International).  This group also communicates and coordinates by WhatsApp, and can be remotely and internationally supervised and connected on this platform.

Mappers share daily progress via WhatsApp

We have also involved UNHCR partners to help coordinate and for community entry. The careful choice of ODK enabled the generation of much interest in the project, due to the power and accessibility of ODK, and its adaptability as an access-point into OSM culture as a whole. Partners without OSM knowledge could easily see the mechanism of Community Mapping as it evolved, producing a working map which could be imagined and understood as surveys appeared on the server and then were used to make focussed map products:


Surveys arriving directly from Field to Server, ready for analysis, cleaning, and OSM uploading (24 hour process)

Embedded Trainings
Around the workshops and trainings, many inter-agency relationships were built, which can potentially serve to reinforce the developing OSM culture in Uganda at national level.

As a result of these practical sessions and field applications, provisional agreements now exist for further partnerships and collaborations with many interested parties. One meeting at UNHCR resulted in the adoption of ODK for field surveying in an immediate project. This demonstrated the potential value of providing partner agencies with embedded training sessions, under the condition that they adopt OSM as everyday practice, serving, and integrated with, the collection of their data. It is hoped that these trainings will remain firmly attached to the community-led way in which the mapping data is collected, and the culture of enterprise embodied in the intrepid commitment of the data collectors themselves.


Training and Orientation: New OSM Arua Members finding their homes on the evolving map

Refugee Surveyor Moses Mawa making full use of the HOT Uganda Mission Order

Additionally, steps have been in the sharing of previously inaccessible data, in contribution to, and benefitting from, the HOT project in Uganda. MSF, REACH and UNHCR are now each running surveys which use our tools and surveys/data models, and trainings and collaborations have been specifically requested by World Vision, IAS, IRC, CORD, World Vision, URCS, and LWF.
Outcome: Partner Access.
Challenges of partner access are tackled firstly by merging proven HOT methods and OSM techniques with locally-found ‘lowest common denominator’ technologies which are already in use (hence the prevalent use of ODK, already a universally NGO-accepted intervention/survey tool). Contributing partners were reassured of the fact that the OpenStreetMap only makes simple geographic data points public, that demographic, political and sensitive data is separated, but that this can be used in an aggregated way to make some powerful analysis. Confidential, sensitive, or inappropriate data is separated, protected, and anonymised at source.

The Evolution of a Community Map is a Stepping-Stone to further advocacy between agencies and within LC and RC communities, upon which to build the next phase of the project – Expansion into Arua, Yumbe, Moyo and beyond.
Monitoring of Most Appropriate Tooling
OSM tools in use are expected to change, and it is important to keep the methodology under constant review. There are many lo-tech and hi-tech OSM tools which ‘hack together’ for crisis-mapping in each context around the world. For tooling use monitoring, a monthly table is updated, with review points to note for accommodating the appropriate suggestion of other OSM tools (e.g. OMK, Maps.Me, OSM Tracker, UAVs, On-Foot Surveys)
Mapping Outcomes/Products


Congestion at Water Tanks – The Majority of Geo-Spatial Data are WASH Interventions also used as an Address/Location System

The most important function of a ‘static’ map product which is not the dynamic OSM online map is for use in community centres to gather feedback and detail from interactive community use. It is hoped that map products such as the following draft – a rendering of training data gathered in the first phase of mapping – will be printed-out and displayed, to create a reciprocal understanding that community members can change how their surroundings are viewed and understood by becoming involved in community mapping. The process also serves as a live example of how OSM globally connects communities through commonly understood spatial language.

Click for Interactive Map: Data gathered at 20th January


12th January, 2018 Full-Data Map, visualising ‘All non-functioning Water Points in Arua Hosting Subcounties’.

In the two and a half weeks since field and classroom training started, well-over the recorded numbers have joined the OpenStreetMap community, many have been trained, and many have agreed to provisional collaborations, some of whom have already adopted OSM into their data collection work, and are now gathering OSM data according to our agreed model. The statistics speak for themselves, but are only supported by the continued field-reality of communities getting mapped, and indicators of needs in service-provision being logged. The sustainability of the community and this project itself depends upon these transparent lines of direct beneficiary-to-donor communication being maintained through continued mapping, embedded and public training follow-ups, and ultimately effective and economic intervention being evidenced as a result of the new geo-spatial coverages achieved.

Conclusion
This method of data collection amongst communities in the field integrates important local content with the trainings. It provides both content and incentive at a local level to learn and apply OpenStreetMap through practical mapping of needs and personal skills education. The partnerships derived from these collaborations are multi-lateral, with members of the Refugee Community working alongside NGO partners in trainings, and reciprocating knowledge and skills between the data management process and the field.

 

Hurricane Irma Call to Action

Hurricane Irma Clean-Up

To all those with time and willingness to come down to Florida but wondering, as I did, how to be part of the solution rather than the problem, I thought it might be useful to write a few words.

I watched the weather avidly as I was flying into the northern US as Irma was bearing-down on the Florida Keys. It was weird to attend a disaster mapathon at OSM Canada, and hear people discussing buildings and features of my beloved Boot Key Harbour. Live-aboard lfe in the Keys is another part of my life, which seemed remote from my work in Africa, and it was eerie to think of places like Sister Creek and Big Pine Island as disaster zones to be mapped.

Community Mapping Florida Keys Disaster Zone – Screenshot from a Mapathon

I thought I should come down self-contained, and knew, in fact, that I might be more useful within the local communnity, rather than as part of an NGO relief intervention which might, or might not, reach the communities who really needed it. But how to have a low personal impact? I miss the Keys, and was concerned for the place – so devastated by the 1932 hurricane – and my friends. Since arriving, I have discovered that not one of my friends did not lose their home. Some have found them again, washed up damaged, impossibly high in the mangroves or well inland. Many have never seen their boat/home since the storm, and now don’t really expect to ever find it. None of it was due to their bad seamanship and preparation. There is a hint that some people were unprepared. One boat with the sails left on, or badly lashed-down, can wreak havoc as it hurtles through moorings and anchorages, taking well-secured boats with it. There are huge efforts going-on to raise not only boats, but houses, too, from the sea-floor. Huge inflatable bags are pumped full of air down below, slowly bringing these structures to the surface where they can be floated into shallower waters.

Boats lost and broken in the harbour and out to sea.

‘Kettling’

How could I be effective, if people didn’t know my skills already? I hired a car. Boat-people are often short on cars. I shopped for enough food and water to be self-sufficient, and a sleeping bag; I could sleep in the car. I got in touch with a few boat-folk on facebook, and finally got the message back that there was a job for me, helping with supply. So I came.

The way down USA Route 1 and the Overseas Highway was littered with evidence of the storm, from Miami down the next two hundred miles or so. A friend, Diana, had hooked up with a church community. I made a beeline for here, and on the way another friend, Charles, got in touch, saying there was another place to stay. Nobody needs food or water. Not really even building materials. The Government and Non-Government agencies have showered the Keys with these. But they do need helping hands. People. Possibly more in the coming weeks, as the focus turns from Keys Recovery efforts to other current crisis elsewhere. Willing hands are needed. Easy-going people who can lend a hand and are accustomed to putting themselves to work are very-much still needed.

Many of the still-working hostelries are taken-up with FEMA workers and other charity groups. But it was initially unclear to me whether I could help. At the church, the main body of work is led, unsurprisingly, by sailors. Sailors live much of their time in crisis, and know how to focus on the important practical things. I spent the first two or three hours here clearing out an old thrift store which had lost some of its roof. Mould climbs the walls very quickly here. The water-logged carpet squelched as I moved around it, pulling out masses of heavy filing cabinets, stacks of sodden paperwork and waterlogged cheap office furniture. It was straightforward but not glamorous work. Perfect. Yesterday, I went with another volunteer to tarp-over a roof with nails and duct-tape on a parishioner’s house which again had lost some of its roof. It was windy with another small storm, but we worked in the sun and gusts to get the tarp nailed down.

Business as Usual

Today has been reconstructing docks, clearing a crumpled mass of metal sheet which was once a shed, some tree surgery too. There are a couple of places to stay in the church hall. But these people can’t afford to offer accommodation until they know how effective somebody will be. They are refugees themselves.

 

Out in the Gulf

However, I had my car, and never needed it yet. The community spirit of the Keys couldn’t be stronger. ‘Welcome Home, Keys Strong’ was the message sprayed onto a plywood sheet as I crossed into Key Largo from the Mainland. Everybody is gathered, Florida-style, in shelter, around a big table, passing round rum and moonshine, and disappearing periodically to attend to a fallen tree, a smashed house, or a boat-recovery project. Hot showers are not a feature. But they don’t need to be. The main tasks are clearing and cleaning masses of foliage and household junk. The waste is phenomenal. But it is imperative to get dirty broken things away from living-space. For health reasons. A Northern hemisphere society accumulates material incessantly, and when this becomes detritus, it becomes hazardous very quickly. The Live-aboard community are the exception, and most treat the loss of their usually ininsured home – their boat – with a readily philosophical outlook. ‘The ocean gives, and the ocean takes away’. But they can inventorise every single item on their boat if pushed. One of everything. Many are living proof of William Blake’s maxim that ‘The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom’. But that excess is an excess of life-experience. They are life-rich, material-poor.

Getting intimate

For many land-lubbers (‘dirt-dwellers’), this is a surreal new world of community contact and co-operation. For many a boat-dweller, this is just another big storm. The waves will keep coming, the trade-wind will keep blowing, and the days will pass. It is not 1932. Please get in touch with me if you need any guidance or opinions on how to be most effective. Organisation, construction, manual and legal skills are needed.

There are two other boats under the one visible…

The houseboat may have brought some boats with it onto the shoals

Waterworld: A diver retrieves a lifetime of personal belongings. A dinghy stands guard over the compressor lifeline.

 

Without Frontiers in Border Country

‘Kondewakoro…’. I say it out-loud without meaning to. The young lad responds in Krio. Ahmet translates, although I’m starting to understand Krio. It is what I thought:
‘He says still three hours. 16 kilometers.’
We don’t have time. We have to turn back, but if I’ve got it wrong, there will be nowhere to stay back where we came from either.

Kondewakoro is a border village in the far reaches of the Toli Chiefdom of Kono District, Sierra Leone. AKA ‘Diamond Country’. On OpenStreetMap, the only map of this corner of Africa, the road we are on shows as a decently defined yellow line. In England or Wales, it would be a tarmacced trunk road. We are not on tarmac, though. No, these roads, for all their ancient status, are not even really roads, more determined cuts through the bush.

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The Guinea Highway

I am attempting to track down Sulaiman Charles, the teacher, but am wondering if this is a wild goose-chase all these hours down this bush track in ‘Zulu One-Five’, our trusty and iconic MSF Landcruiser. Getting battered about hour after hour, rock after rock, river after river. I have learned to trust Ahmet’s driving through these unlikely passages. I made an arrangement with Sulaiman to meet on the road to Kondewakoro over a broken phone conversation more than six hours ago. Sulaiman is an energetic spokesperson, a brilliant teacher with presence and vigour. He is one of my Field Team Leaders, in charge of six Sierra Leone Red Cross volunteers who are methodically surveying the missing, mis-named, and un-represented villages of the border region for the Post-Ebola Community Rebuild project. Spearheaded by Missing Maps (American Red Cross, MSF, Humanitarian OpenStreetMap), it is a fundamental vulnerability assessment of at-risk areas where epidemics and natural disasters can run and spread for weeks un-checked.

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Working the Map (Sulaiman’s Chiefdoms)

We are here to correct the map, or more accurately, to leave the capacity for the inhabitants of Toli to map themselves. We have trained four other team leaders like Sulaiman – the best and brightest that the national border regions have to offer. We have also been training a cohort of supervised volunteers. Trained them in the classroom. But this is the bush. And now it is a question of finding them, as they map what can’t be mapped, and we, hampered by the very resistance factors which have prohibited this mapping for so long, are trying to support.
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Volunteers Putting the Health Centres on the Map in Koinadugu District, aka ‘The Land of the Powerful Mixture’

In another chiefdom in the North I came across a border crossing into Guinea made of rickety palm-wood bars. I was reluctant to ‘snap’ the sleepy photogenic border-guard in his vest, standing under the words ‘Immigration’ pencilled on the flaking cement above the’office’ doorway. Things can escalate easily here. There are strict security protocols, and the sensitivity of this ‘porous’ borderland domain dictates that we follow strict MSF radio-contact schedules. We are in two-hourly contact with the radio-room in Freetown. A day away. Now, I would like to meet Sulaiman at the border, but we have a lot of ground to cover, and a six o’clock travel curfew to observe. This is no-man’s land. I am aware of the need for caution.
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And here we are with this young biker now, deep in the forest, on the way to Kondewakoro. His chinese-built 125cc road bike has toppled, as he has tried to come up the impossible rocky slope which we, somehow, are attempting to go down. He is laden with six large jerry cans of cow milk, but amazingly there has been no spillage, and we help him re-tie the load. The motorbike is low on its suspension, and the sweating rider is using all his bush-riding skills to snake the bike between the rocks, load and all. But where is Sulaiman? I note that he is young. Young enough to have recently been in school. As we help him get going again, I have a last-minute thought – he might know Sulaiman.

‘Red Cross Motorbike. Sulaiman the teacher. Have you seen him this way?’
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How to Load a Motorbike

Imperceptibly he nods, and says something. Ahmet interprets a Krio mutter and throw of the head.
‘He is here. Up ahead.’ A huge grin. Somewhere, down these rocks, through the next river, we will find him. Ahmet is visibly relieved. I knew I could trust Sulaiman, my ‘brother from another mother’, he has called me in the training sessions. But I’m relieved too.
‘…and is there another road?’ No. No other road. This is the only way to Kondewakoro. We get back into the Landcruiser which flops down the track between the boulders. It doesn’t feel possible yet, but we have somewhere to stay tonight. One hour to go until curfew. No turning back, but now it is certain that we will find him.

And ten minutes later we literally almost run-over Sulaiman on his motorbike. Komba, the isolated volunteer tasked with this spur of the project is interviewing the Village Chief in a clearing. It turns out Komba is a star surveyor, with an amazing grasp of the job in hand. It is difficult to deliver the detailed survey, with its questions about water availability, its carefully crafted cross-referencing of Sanitation and Disease questions, road conditions and Healthcare access. But it has been worth coming to see how it is done properly.

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Missing Maps Field Consultation: Wiring Motorbikes to Charge Phones

There has been a ‘Loma’ Market here today. It has been a hive of activity. As I look around this village, seemingly thriving in its own right, I can’t help wondering how on earth some of this actual concrete came to be here, given the impossible nature of the only road in. It will be a long time before these villages have convincing vehicular access, despite the fact that they are located on this footpath they call ‘The Guinea Highway’. This track, for better or worse, protects this village in some way, from invasion, but at the same time makes it vulnerable to a changing world around it.

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Ooops

As we photograph wells and water sources, with different surveys, the bigger picture which emerges is the sparsity of consistent water, and the dangerous propensity of water-contamination at source. Villages look well-ordered sometimes, but once surveys start to show exactly how many people actually use the water-sources, how often they dry-up, and how close to latrines (another resource we survey) they can be, the data starts to tell another story; desperate need and hard-boiled living in this disowned and precarious border area. I later geo-photograph two pumps in Kpetema – an ‘India MkII’ and a ‘Bush’ Pump. Neither of them dries up in dry season, which makes Kpetema regionally important. We have come across several villages where women are washing in the ford we are crossing, and children carry water from the same river up the hill for drinking.

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These communities are susceptible to so much disease from so many quarters. When disaster occurs, their location needs to be traced. Whatever way the locals want it, it needs a name – particularly when some desperate community mobilisation team in the capital receive a dying patient and are trying to pinpoint the place they came from. Local names are important. Geo-tags are critical. Terror spreads as fast as the epidemic itself in these communities, and there are many instances of death resulting from panic as well as actual disease. The enemy is the unknown.

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It is the end of the day now, and gaving gathered for council on wooden benches, and sat through typically long-winded introductions with Mami-Queen and Chief, solemn nods were closely followed by furious handshakes (post-Ebola protocol thankfully now permits careful physical contact) and gentle curiosity. Part of the meeting ritual involved the explanation of the corrected name of this village. It moved because of forest fires decades ago, so what I have on my OpenStreetMap, ‘Kekeya’, compiled from old military or colonial data, needs adjusting and renaming. The Chief and the Youth Leader peered curiously over my shoulder as I renamed the village on my phone screen. Approving grunts at me spelling-out the proper village name give way to open-faced enthusiasm and laughing recognition of Chiefdoms and Sub-Chiefdoms so carefully researched by our team and now so available on our own ARC-developed OpenMapKit App.

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Screenshot with my GPS tracks from OpenStreetMap on Android – The Everyman SatNav.

It has already been established that I am the evangelist in my team, and the people here, perhaps more than a proprietary-thinking western audience, get the publicly owned ethos of our OPEN StreetMap. Our data tools are not concerned with this one-time survey event. Our tools are what you could call ‘culturally scaleable’. They can be used by anyone who understands them, anyone with an android phone, and what we are fundamentally here to do is to spread the word. ‘Communities, map yourselves, on your own terms, [Arguably] before you become mapped by outsiders…’, is our message. This is the OpenSource Global Digital Revolution which can empower the marginalised across cultures.

And now the dim shape of the Landcruiser looms in the gloaming as I look out into the village from the Out-Patient’s waiting bench. Night is falling. Ahmet, my driver, is preparing the Landcruiser for the night. The sound of crickets and other forest insects almost drowns out the quiet african consonants being murmurred over food amongst the houses across the track. The cool crescent of the moon is a welcome sight beckoning the forest woodsmoke to rise and meet it. In another part of africa it has celestial pageantry which I know. I wonder, through the dusk, how they read the stars here. The old navigation envisaged by the new.

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I shall sleep in the mud-built health outpost tonight. The nurse cooks under the palm kitchen roof, and I am sitting, fresh-washed and waiting for what will turn out to be a huge bowl of sweet rice and yoghurt. The pot is simmering on the fire already, gently steaming. I have done ‘Community Entry’. There are rules with village contact here, and society dictates that strangers initially approach the Chief. The performance of this tradition goes back in time, reflecting how outsiders have always been received into these isolated communities.

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Later-on I lie under the mosquito net thinking. So: the terrain was too tough for even Zulu One-Five to make it to the border by curfew. Kondewakoro will wait for another time. But it is good to be here, and to have made contact with surveyors on their home territory. Despite the magic of mobile phone network when it is available, Sulaiman has made sure messages are sent through the traditional channels of communication (although drums here, it seems, are a thing of the past). Much as I trust the message of the digital innovation we have come to live by in the west, I know that tomorrow I will meet with Alice and Daniel for motorbike charging instruction and mapping survey technique and evaluation. Without fail.

The comforting village noises have given way to evocative night bush noises, and I drift off to sleep wondering who it was that first surveyed this village all those decades ago…