Hi all, I'd like to propose a talk or panel for the HOT Summit on the subject of large scale, virtual mapathons.
The way the HOT community responds in waves following a crisis, or a request from an NGO, is incredible. Truly impressive. The Missing Maps project obviously benefits from this capacity and commitment and many of you have contributed to Missing Maps tasks. Missing Maps has had considerable success in bringing new people into HOT via the tasking manager at mapathons. We think that, at the London Missing Mapathons alone, we have had over 500 people attending and contributing and the vast majority of these are new to HOT. At a physical event, we are able to train and support these new mappers in order to try and maintain high quality data. This is great, but we are faced with the problem of scaling this model of participation. In London, we can't find venues big enough to cope with demand (last month, 80 places were booked in less than three hours) and we do not have the capacity within MSF, the British Red Cross and the local HOT community to significantly increase the number of mapathons we host. There are more and more Missing Maps events happening independently of (although supported by) the organisations involved, which is hugely welcome. But, the fact remains that there is appetite for involvement from many more places than there are mapathons. One of the potential ways to feed this appetite (and by extension, expand the capacity of HOT) is to organise regular, large scale remote mapathons, with training, context, tasking and support built in. I would love to explore this possibility with you guys and thought the summit might be a good place to start the conversation. Is anyone up for joining me in presenting this idea for discussion? I am not sure yet whether a panel, a talk or a workshop is the most appropriate and I don't claim to be an expert (although I would love to share our London experiences with you), so it would be great to collaborate on this. If anyone is interested, please drop me a line. Cheers, Pete -- *Pete Masters* Missing Maps Project Coordinator +44 7921 781 518 missingmaps.org <http://www.missingmaps.org/> *@pedrito1414* <https://twitter.com/TheMissingMaps> *@theMissingMaps* <https://twitter.com/TheMissingMaps> *facebook.com/MissingMapsProject* <https://www.facebook.com/MissingMapsProject>
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