Last night the Support team had our first meeting with the HOT ground team in Lomé, the capital city of Togo. Please see the “Announcing the Support Team Experiment” email thread for details of how this team will function. This email will be our first ‘report’ back to the community from meeting with our counterparts on the ground team.
Overview: We met with Nicolas Chavent who is currently leading the team to discuss their plans as well as assess how we could help them. Currently they have a team of about 10 to 20 mappers who will be working in the city. They plan to have some mapping parties over the coming days to gather more details for the map. They are also hoping to collaborate in the future with some architecture students from the local university to study a portion of the city. Finally they are doing some work with the local forestry department, although we do not know the extent or the details of this collaboration. Current Needs: The team was enthusiastic about this experimental project and expressed several current needs to us. First of all, they are requesting some help translating some of the documents they have written from French into English. We don’t have a list of documents at the moment but if you would be interested in helping with such an effort please let us know. Another need is for some remote mapping work to be done in the vicinity of the “WoeLab”, which is a Maker Space where the team is working from. The following link is to the area in question. No specific details yet on exactly what to map but road and building coverage in the vicinity of WoeLab would probably be good for them to experiment with surveying techniques (walking papers, photo mapping, etc). This small area can then serve as a “testbed” for them to practice mapping and then these skills can be applied to the rest of the city once they have been mastered. http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=6.177681&lon=1.198744&zoom=18&layers=M Finally, they would eventually like complete building coverage for at least the western portion of the town where they will be working with the architectural students. This collaboration will not take place immediately, so this wider area is lower priority than the area directly around WoeLab, but it should be done before this collaboration begins. We do not have a firm date for this yet but it is not in the immediate future, so we have a bit of time to finish this area. Here is the tasking manager job for that request. In consideration of the request to map around WoeLab it would make sense to start working on this task there on the north and then towards the south. http://tasks.hotosm.org/job/262 We are looking forward to working with the community on this and are excited to see how it works. The ground teams in other countries have already been very successful, and we hope to make them even more so going forward by better involving the community in the action. Signed, The Members of the Togo Experimental Support Team Pierre Béland Andrew Buck Will Skora
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