Category Archives: Community Mapping Innovation

The Digital Revolution and Arabic OpenData

The Desert Oasis of Al Azraq, Jordan, once a verdant wetland, with ‘shining pools’ (T.E. Lawrence)

The Jordan ‘Community-Mapping Climate Memory’ project aims to help local people map how they and their livelihoods are adapting to extreme and accelerated climate change. In Al Azraq desert oasis, OpenStreetMap (OSM) is getting used to record cultural practices as a living archive of usable community assets. The project draws on a legacy of OSM projects mapping critical resources, traditional coping practices around these, and the narratives that link them. Our mission is to establish a common frame of reference for multi-ethnic cooperation, to manage diminishing resources in a place where the same landscape has different meanings for different peoples.

The now deserted fishing village of Al Azraq (Old Town)

Our Community Mapping team is adapting methods used in humanitarian scenarios, where emergency and development resource management has benefited from community input, to connect climate science with hyper-local lived experience. By leveraging OpenSource Community Mapping methods, the community will have an ‘auto-ethnographic’ hand in practical, participatory solutions to climate-affected issues in their immediate locale. We hope that citizen science can record this visibly-unfolding climate crisis, promoting cultural visibility and local economic resilience. Convening Princess Sumaya University (PSUT) YouthMappers, OSM Jordan, and the national Wikimedia foundation as collaborators, we hope it will create a national precedent.

The Beginnings: “showcase” uMap of Al Azraq community profiling. This geo-indexes community wikimedia content through OpenStreetMap links. It’s all in the Public Domain (Credit: OSM Contributors)

It’s an exciting project, not least because of the location, amongst the desert castles and pathways of the Arabian Peninsula, steeped in history and visually stunning. OpenStreetMap Community Mapping is, by definition, adaptive. It bolts together different elements of OpenSource knowledge and tooling to suit community needs locally. This project is no different. It’s experimental. Much trialing and consultation time has been necessary to create a unique and innovative methodology for the particular needs of this culturally-diverse region. Connecting OpenStreetMap with what I’m calling ‘The Wikisphere’ seems to clearly resonate with these communities.

Why Azraq?

Around the world, hyper-local connections with the land have been slowly occulted over the past few centuries by the rise of industrial agri-practices. In Al Azraq, this has happened within three decades. The loss of age-old livelihoods of fishing, growing, trading and herding has led to economic deprivation, but this sudden and catastrophic change has been accommodated by the communities in creative ways.

Measurable documentation of human resilience in the face of change may provide unprecedented insights for wider sustainable changemaking. Recognising the cultural significance of Al Azraq, these insights, we hope, can be extrapolated as a regional exemplar of how local issues bear on the wider global climate change agenda. Social capital remains strong in community memory here, and the story and heritage still linked to the landscape can give better public understanding of both vulnerability and resilience in these under-represented communities.

The receding wetlands: faded environmental grandeur – a paradigm for the planet

Al Azraq is in the Black Desert, fifty miles East of Amman, in modern-day Jordan. Lawrence of Arabia was Headquartered in this formerly beautiful, verdant oasis. Historically, it holds major national significance for Jordanians. The area is surrounded and embedded with layer upon layer of history and culture. Yet visitors to Al Azraq may be surprised even to find more than some tents around a ruined castle. Google shows one or two hostelries and some commercial entities, some buildings, but as a prime cultural site and destination, Al Azraq seems invisible. One tourism page even reads: ‘The town of Azraq itself is small and does not offer anything of particular interest, apart from the nearby castle’

Azraq’s Castle is famous, but other desert castles also litter the area, even in town, with stories of buried treasure, wild animals, hunting and desert skirmishes infusing every street corner. These stories are the real character of Al Azraq. They are hyper-local folk histories about rituals and technologies which are in danger of being forgotten.

Desert Castles and Hunting Lodges punctuate this once opulent area, famed for its big game hunting and biodiversity

Operations:

Our project proposes that a visualising something different than western tourism interests could help Azraq survive it’s particular climate crisis. Something that the community can own, edit, and develop for themselves. So for the past months, in an organised editing campaign, we have been creating a ‘basemap’ of the area. From scratch. This is now ready for data to be added from the local community.

Remote mappers global WhatsApp group: knowledge exchange to help remote mapping

A team of multi-national OpenStreetMap volunteers have been drawing around houses and roads on satellite imagery, to create a ‘base-map’ of every building in Al Azraq, as digital shapes. We created a mapping task for Al Azraq, on the global Tasking Manager platform run by Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team. Accompanying the task are instructions, and documentation is maintained and updated on the OpenStreetMap wiki. Edits currently represent contributions from English, Scottish, Welsh, Lugbara, Luganda, Druze, Bedouin, Syrian, Palestinian, and Sheshen origins. I may have missed some!

OpenStreetMap

OpenStreetMap is particularly good for visualising hyper-local human-based interests by enabling community visibility through measurable ‘home-made’ GIS data. Community Mapping can be used by communities to represent their needs, assets and cultural capital, and thereby to have a say in their own resource allocation.

Remote Mapping of Al Azraq – tracing buildings from Satellite Imagery (Credit: JOSM/OSM Contributors)

This is the first time that a whole town has been comprehensively base-mapped in such a way in Jordan, and it represents a progressive regional first, allowing community-led Open Mapping to shape a field-derived research agenda at national level. Jordan enjoys a reputation for multi-ethnic unity, and it is exciting to feel part of this agenda, connecting such diverse local interests with global development themes.

Quasr Al Azraq/Al Azraq Castle – Former wetlands clearly visible beyond the road. Within living memory, this once verdant landscape has become desertified, due to climatic and human-influenced changes.

The ancient fortified desert castle of Al Azraq – possibly Pullman’s ‘Blue Hotel’, certainly Lawrence’s Headquarters, predating the Romans by milennia

We have now been remote-mapping for some months, and Dayan has been helping from Uganda. It is a truly intercontinental project, and exciting to convene trainings where his refugee-mapping expertise is supporting the team from a small rural house on the South Sudan borders. The brand new community map now appears in phone Apps like Maps.Me, AllTrails, AppleMaps, TomTom, anything using OpenStreetMap.

The spectacular stone beams of Al Azraq Desert Castle

And on the ground, we are starting to gather a collective of “Practical Community Mappers” across local communities to record land-based skills, history, and lived experience. Place-based practical knowledge is still embedded within living memory in Al Azraq. It is an intangible heritage we can still access, representing remnants of a self-contained local economy. People still remember how this worked.

The beginnings of the Levant’s first OSM Field Mapping team.

The aim of this project is to leverage a rich history of rural resilience, agility and inventiveness; to help Azraq’s people express socio-economic and cultural visibility, but also to create actionable methods for future generations to have a pro-active voice. To help create this science communication capacity, we have the privilege of Prof. Iain Stewart’s expertise leading the project. As broadcaster, science communicator and geologist, Iain has centralised community-owned data in his research agenda as UNESCO Chair at the Royal Jordanian Scientific Society (RSS).

Watch this space for updates on our progress.

Pioneering Community Open Mapping in the UK

Wellbeing, Resilience, and Food-Desert-mapping. With Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, NHS Wales and Missing Maps/Medecins Sans Frontieres.

Community-Devised Resilience and Wellbeing Map – Social Assets in Gurnos and Galon Uchaf, Merthyr Tydfil

Community-led data helped to map wider determinants of Wellbeing, Co-morbidities, Social Exclusion and outbreak vulnerability. Reconnecting the NHS with its communities in the birth-place of the NHS (and of the Labour Party).

We adapted Motorcycle Mapping methods previously used with Medecins Sans Frontieres, Red Cross, UN, African Health Ministries and INGOs to use for mapping social inclusion, outbreak resilience, climate justice and lived Wellbeing experiences. Based out of Twyn Community Hub, Mel, Michael and Amanda were our community Disaster Risk Reduction mappers. Walking miles of Merthyr, they interviewed for perceptions of need, food and social access, and community assets. They then surveyed infrastructural provision realities site-by site. The reports created cultural, resource-access map layers, profiling a rich social capital, a proud pre-industrial heritage, (including ancient mythologies/holy sites), and the qualitative relations between perception and reality in the community voice. All available in the public domain, these anonymous data are your pocket, on all phone apps using OpenStreetMap/Mapbox etc wiki-maps.

Mapping Land Voices – the National Library Sound Archive

Mapio Lleisiau’r Tir / Mapping Land Voices – August 2021

Stories of the forest sound archives: https://www.peoplescollection.wales/collections/1102166

Who knew that there were crofts hidden in the hills of my next-door village in Wales? I didn’t until very recently, when we started listening to the British Library/National Library of Wales sound archives collection.

Dai Morgan, the Horse-Boy

I mean sure, Dai Morgan used to lean on the garden fence between our houses and tell me stories about running away with the mountain ponies when he was a young horse-boy. So near-by and yet, in another village. Dai used to point over towards the north side of the Ystwyth Valley and, conspiratorially, quietly say, ‘they’re different, those people. North Wales, you see. They think differently’. Less than a mile away.

Dai also told me a story once, about when he had been a Gwas (households had several of these ‘farm servants’) as a lad. He was a horse-boy, and was fascinated with the personalities and breeds of the mountain ponies, which, he said, were four types, which never interbred. He was convinced of this, saying that the original Cardiganshire ponies were russet, yellow and grey, all with white flashes on head and hoof. One day, he was in a far field of the farm in Bont, when the wild horses came down to the fenceline. Dai managed to coax one close and jump on. It bolted and he clung to its bare back, as the whole group of them ran back into the mountains. On and on they ran throught the night, until they came to a small upland stand of trees by a deserted stream and suddenly stopped.

‘It was their home’, Dai explained. ‘I was able to jump off, but it took me hours to walk back, through the night, and I just arrived in time to dodge trouble and do the milking at 5am.’

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

I can see it now in these crofts. They had a local perspective. And even though hill-people were mobile – many even lived away for a few years and worked in London – that was most certainly a foreign migration, reminding me of the London Kurds or Portuguese.

When they were back on their lands, it was exotic, too, for Nant Stallwen to marry into ‘Llew Goch’ (meaning: the family running the pub in Bont). It was 10 miles away, if that. Such households were known as communities in their own right, and would turn up to events as an geographical entity – Nantrwch (stream of the sow), Maesglas (blue field).

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

We’re listening to these interviews whilst we sit and draw. Mountain voices. Some coughing, laughing, straying from the question. It’s a very wild but intimate feeling as the rain speckles your face and you imagine similar tactile experiences in this space 60 years ago.

Interpretation of Tom Morgan’s description of life in the Crofftau (Rupert Allan – YouTube)

When Peggy Maesglas from (Soar y Mynydd) was diagnosed with Hiraeth as a boarding school pupil in Tregaron, her family left the farm-hands running the farm ‘household’ and moved down to town to give her the support she needed. These were close communities, and Peggy also remembers that Nant Stalwen farm would have two or three thousand sheep shearing, and over 100 horses would be gathered, as all the shearers from the hill farms around – men and boys – would muck-in.

When chapel was on, and the preacher visiting for the weekend, again there were horses. Hundreds of them, grazing the near bog. As well as a chapel which was taken to Bala on the back of a lorry,Tom Bronant tells of breaking the ponies in record time by doing on the deep bog, where they would tire much quicker than back in the lowlands.

Tom’s recollections of Caio Evans leading the Free Wales Army on horseback manouevres up on the Devils Staircase and around Llyn Brianne are coupled with tales of all the ‘bois’ grabbing a lorry in the middle of the night in Tregaron, and coming up to sing outside Nant Llwyd, to see off a bride-to be. They turned up some time after midnight, and even the dogs were scared by the noise! The lights at the farm went on, the doors opened, and they were welcomed in to party forester-style into the small hours.

And ‘Nant Llwyd’, as a household, were legendary, with family and gwasau (farm-hands) comprising a formidable force when it came to horsemanship and community events. But it was Peggy Maesglas who features as the ‘man vs horse’ competition champion, and known for the finest horsemanship in the area, she could get back from Tregaron to Soar in less than an hour, if she hurried.

The reputation of Caio, and his character, are easily forgotten these days, As is the very comprehensive threat which the FWA implied for Westminster. Caio’s leadership and physical presence comes across in different accounts, though, and he was clearly universally admired – almost like (and contemporaneous with) Che Guevara. Organised and agile, his well-put-together group seems revered as a not inconsiderable guerilla force. And the hills, unroaded but easily-navigated by skilled horsemanship, must have presented an important dilemma for the antiquated machinery of a threadbare post-war english task force.

One of the independent flags of Wales, at Castell y Bere (CC BY 4.0)

These landscapes are boggy and hard to navigate. But roads – even tracks – were less important when you consider that everybody had a horse which could graze the mountain grass. Free fast transport for everybody. And Peggy Maesglas says that the roads that the forestry brought in destroyed the communities. The sound archive research continues next month, with Stories of the Forest from Soar y Mynydd and Nant Doethie.

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.