This e-mail is to announce the creation of an experimental support team to work out better ways of communicating with, and assisting, our ground teams in developing countries. Currently HOT has ground teams training mappers and organizing mapping parties in developing countries all over the world, however at the moment these teams are mostly left on their own with little assistance from the rest of the HOT community. The reason for this is largely down to a simple lack of communication due to the limited internet access by the ground team, as well as lack of time on their part to interface with the community. As a possible solution to these problems we have started an experiment of using a small support team which will communicate with the ground team on a regular basis to assess their needs and collect information to take back to the wider HOT community of volunteers. The exact details of the setup have not been formalized yet, since we are only just trying out this system and expect it to evolve over time as we learn how to better assist our field teams.
With this in mind, we have decided to begin the experiment by working with a field team which has just been set up in Lomé, Togo. Lomé is the capital of Togo, with almost a million residents, however it is only partially mapped in OSM despite the availability of Bing imagery there. This will provide us with a good place to experiment in assisting the ground team remotely since there is still a lot for remote volunteers to help with. The ground team has been set up by Nicolas Chavent who will be setting up other teams across Africa in the coming weeks and after he leaves Togo the team will be led by Amadou Ndong. The support team will continue meeting with the team in Togo and periodically report to the HOT community on the mailing list to relay their needs and requests for assistance. We will then aggregate back the feedback from the volunteer community to pass it back to them at our next meeting. We hope this will allow the community to share their experience and ideas with the ground team to help them work more effectively. Even though there is no shortage of things to map in Lomé, we hope the assistance to the ground teams will go beyond simply tracing map data. Ground teams need many other kinds of support as well, and we hope to work with the community to assist them with these other tasks, too. Things like translating documents, developing tools and techniques, searching the web for information, writing custom scripts to optimize their workflow for their unique environment and many others, are things which often end up taking up a lot of the ground team’s time. We hope that by engaging the wider community to help with these other issues, we will free up their time to do more map surveying, thus producing a much richer map than simply traced streets with a few scattered POIs. Please keep in mind that this is meant to be an experiment, and we expect the process to evolve as we get feedback on it from the ground team, and from the community. We welcome your feedback in this e-mail thread about the project and any suggestions you have as the project progresses. We will start a second e-mail thread with the results of our first meeting and requests from the team to try to keep that discussion separate from the discussion about the team in general. We look forward to working with the community on this experiment and hope that it proves to be a success, and a guide to future ground team deployments.
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