If you have digital, online skills, a broadband connection and some free time, then we’re looking for Community Mapmaker Volunteers who can help us greatly improve the publicly available mapping for North East Lincolnshire.
Detailed maps are very helpful for community support and development. Detailed maps allow people who live and work in the community to understand what is around them – what community or public services are available, where businesses are, where to shop, more about leisure facilities etc. We increasingly rely on detailed mapping to help us get around, connect and explore and unearth previously unknown places and services.
VANEL is making the transition on our INandAROUND community websites from Google Maps to OpenStreetMap (OSM). OSM allows fine details at a very local level – but importantly is editable by the general public (with the right skills), so that anyone and everyone contributes to improved mapping.
If you look at the OSM mapping for North East Lincolnshire (and we’re particularly interested in Cleethorpes at the moment), then the level of detail across most of the area could benefit from great improvement.
We’re looking to enlist a large number of local volunteers (with local knowledge and the ability to get out and about in the streets and areas around them) to help significantly improve the details on our local OSM mapping.
You
You can put as much time into this role as you like. You may choose to just make one simple change to something you know that is wrong on the maps, or you may work around an entire area of North East Lincolnshire adding details as you go!
As long as you have access to the internet and a computer (or tablet or even at the extreme a decent smartphone) then you will be able to make improvements to the OSM mapping.
Ideally you’ll also be able to get out and about into your community to track the shapes of buildings, add detailed information, ensure roads and paths and details are all correct and generally help make changes.
You can therefore work at your own pace from your own home or wherever suits you.
You just need to be able to work on a technical, web based tool on your own with just a little kick-start and support from VANEL.
We
We will provide you with training on how to use OpenStreetMap, how to suggest changes or make changes at all kinds of different levels of complexity. You may just help at the level of ‘reporting’ necessary changes, or you may be able to make all those edits yourself. We’ll ensure that everyone who is able to help is shown an appropriate way to contribute, but we’ll also coordinate everyone so that we try and make the most effective use of a team of mapping volunteers. After all, there’s no point 10 people mapping and re-mapping the same street when there are perhaps unmapped areas that need more focus instead.
We’d like
We’d like you to help us move parts of the North East Lincolnshire OSM map from something like this…
to something like this…
Next steps
If you are interested (because you like technical tasks, are interested in mapping, or geography, or the community around you), then we’d like to hear from you.
Contact Karl Elliott or Joe Mager at VANEL in the first instance (karl@vanel.org.uk or joe@vanel.org.uk or via 01472 231123). We’ll try and arrange an appointment with you in Grimsby, Immingham or Cleethorpes quickly so that we can register you as one of our Community Mapmakers and we can learn which parts of North East Lincolnshire should would be best suited to helping to map.
Note: OpenStreetMap is exactly that – open – which means you could head to the website, register and get started on editing the map as soon as you’ve trained yourself up. But we’d really, really like to coordinate this map improvement effort across the area. We can help train/support you, but importantly we can make sure that the whole mapmaking ‘taskforce’ knows what each other are doing and we can work better together.
We’ll be holding ‘open mapping’ workshops every month – both introductions, networking, training on OpenStreetMap and it’s tools and task allocations as necessary.
Our next ‘open mapping’ workshop will be Wednesday 5th August, 10am (to approx. 11.30am) at Sidney Sussex Pavilion in Cleethorpes. But please get in touch with us beforehand to let us know you are interested in this opportunity.
We look forward to hearing from you.