Microgrants/Microgrants 2020/Proposal/OSM Ireland Buildings
About your Mapping Community
Tell us a little bit about your mapping community at the moment, some examples of details to include are below, but please provide us with any information you think is relevant. Please write 100-200 words
We are OpenStreetMap Ireland, with members from across the island. We were officially accepted as a local chapter at the 2019 SotM, but the community has been active for a much longer time. The official local chapter has 18 formal subscribers, but an average community involvement, for mapathons for example, is around 30 mappers, as these are held in cities/towns all over the island they involve the local mappers in the area. Our data extracts show that around 30-35 people actively map every 24 hours. But given the population size, and latent interest in mapping this could be significantly higher.
We are currently undertaking a large multi-year project to map all of the buildings in Ireland (branded campaign #osmIRL_buildings). This is a community effort with a tasking manager set up to track progress (https://tasks.openstreetmap.ie/). The task was chosen because there is a very visible lack of building completeness on OpenStreetMap in Ireland, with an estimate of about barely 20% of Ireland’s buildings being mapped at the end of 2019. The task is also a relatively basic level, but can invite detailed contributions from mappers with different levels of experience. Because the formal completion of the task has a low entry bar, it has great potential to engage a much wider public and increase visibility and involvement in OSM across Ireland.
What do you need the grant money for?
We want to understand what you plan to buy, how much you plan to buy, and why this will help you to scale your community mapping efforts. There are two tables for you to fill in your response, and you may add more rows as needed. Some examples are in the table for your reference. You are welcome to use a different format in your response, but please make sure to include these details.
Our strategy with the microgrant has four strands, each addressing a weakness or inconsistency in our present level of capacity and helping the community to get to the next level in terms of size, diversity and reach through promoting the present community task. The strands are: Market the osmIRL_buildings task more effectively to sustain from existing participants Support an island-wide recruitment campaign through this task
We have been engaging the OSM community with the present project and there has been a lot of interest. To the date of this application, we have had 155 mappers map a tile in our tasking manager. We have also hosted a week long community map sprint during the Covid-19 lockdown. In that sprint we had 91 contributors map 39,208 buildings in a single week; see timeline of results: (https://twitter.com/osm_ie/status/1255454629170741254) However, we are certain that we can do a better job reaching out to the existing community and continuing to grow with a little bit of seed funding to support our activities.
The main items applied for can all be used long-term (after COvid-19) to support osmIRL having a stall at trade fairs or large conferences, for example GIS Ireland, or the Geography conferences.
Budget breakdown
Give your budget breakdown here. If you would like to present your budget in a tabular format, you can use this tool to convert your spreadsheet into a wikitable and paste the code below here
| Item | What do you plan to spend the money on? | Expected cost per unit (in Euros) | Quantity you plan to buy / subscription length | Expected total cost (in Euros) | Why is it needed? (Please give as much detail as possible.) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Stickers | €1.20 with postage and envelope | 500 | €600 | Stickers for the following milestones:
Bronze - First tiles completed and verified in the tasking manager Silver - 10 tiles completed Gold - 100 tiles completed Platinum - 1000 tiles completed Sticker cost around €0.20/sticker, but due to social distancing most will be delivered by post at €1/delivery. |
| 2 | Pull up banners | €60 per 1 | 3 | €180 | 1 Permanent generic osm Ireland banner, and 2 related to the present buildings |
| 3 | Mouse Mats | €1.20 | 300 | €360 | Branded to be given on completion of 10,000 buildings |
| 4 | Micro SD | €7.80 | 20 | €156 | 32 GB cards (bulk price) To be used to assist more members capturing more mapillary street imagery, to be offered to android users with higher contributions |
| 5 | LinkedIn advertising | €4.79 per 1,000 impressions and €1.25 per engagement | 1 days | €300 | Osm Ireland has a LinkedIn company page which while having a lot of members has low levels of engagement. However, activity sinks down on time-lines, but a promoted post or advert would not. The LinkedIn page has big potential to help us grow our community, especially to people who may already be involved in GIS, Geography, Environmental analysis, and Civil Engineering. To be used on specific days when there is a recruitment drive, or an activity or event online using LinkedIns price tariff for impressions or targetted engagements. |
| 6 | Twitter advertising | €1.05 per engagement | 2 days | €400 | Cost of advertising/promoting osm.ie website, tasks page and other materials. A twitter advertising campaign would be useful when we have future online mapathons and video meetups in the coming months. |
| Subtotal applied for: €1,996 | |||||
If you receive a grant, what do you aim to achieve?
It is recommended that this supports mission of the OSM Foundation and your local community. Please provide us with any information you think is relevant including the metrics you expect to achieve. Please write 100-200 words.
The map of Ireland has really benefited from a similar project to #osmIRL-buildings in the past; this was the townlands project www.townlands.ie This was a project in 2013-2016 to map all of the townlands in Ireland. We feel that the OpenStreetMap Ireland Buildings project has the same possibility, to take the OSM community to the next level in Ireland. We feel that having a common task, which is well promoted is the way to grow our community and make a more complete map. In the longer term adding buildings helps to see other gaps in the completeness of the map quicker - for example missing drives and service roads to where building are, or missing land-use polygons surrounding large numbers of buildings. Mapping buildings would also lead to easier future projects to create addresses, which would increase re-use of the osm data by multiples.
With the support of OSMF and the mapping community inside and outside the island osm Ireland is an all island body. Every part of Ireland is covered in the buildings task.
Every part of Ireland is covered in the building's tasks, however, this would not be complete prior to the microgrant being used. We presently have 1.1 million buildings, with potentially 5.5million in total. At the present speed of added buildings the building task will last 4 years. We need to quicken this up to last 2 years to finish in 2022, as was attempted in Canada and Austria.This will need us to be producing 40,000 buildings per week
The aim would be to double or treble the number of people mapping on a daily basis in Ireland, and increase the number of subscribers to the company to at least 50.
Do you receive funding from any other sources at the moment?
If you receive funding from other organisations currently, please state how much this is, whether the donations are regular or one off, and how these funds have been raised. Please write no more than 300 words. If you have any sources of co-funding for this grant application, please provide details. Examples of this might be if you have any partners who would be willing to match grant funding if you receive it, or if your project has existing funding. Please provide as much detail as possible.
OpenStreetMap Ireland has a membership fee, which is: Ordinary Memberships €15.00 (or £13.00 for NI) Concession Membership Rate (unwaged or student) €5.00 (or £4.00 for NI) Corporate Membership (by resolution of the board) €300.00 (or £260.00 for NI)
We do not currently have any corporate members at present.
Is there anything you would like OSMF to support you with?
If there is anything which you would like OSMF to support you with in order to strengthen your project, please let us know. For example, this could include building relationships with OSM communities, sourcing updated imagery for mapping projects, or guidance on how to use some of the tools we have created. We want to do our best to support OSM communities, so please let us know what you need. Please write no more than 150 words.
We would welcome OSMF setting up a governance relationship on progress with our building task, which is based on updates and measurable outcomes and map completeness.
We are open to OSMF’s ideas and assistance with promoting our mapping effort outside of the island of Ireland.
Declaration
By submitting this form to the OpenStreetMap Foundation, you certify the information contained in this application is correct, and that if you are awarded a grant, you will use it only for the purposes described above. You will provide written documentation and receipts for all of your expenses to the OSM Foundation to demonstrate this. You understand that the decisions made by the OSM Foundation Microgrants committee are final.
I, Heikki Vesanto, agree to follow the above declaration.
Endorsements
Community members are encouraged to endorse your project request here!
I've been following the OSMF Ireland journey through Twitter. I admire their passion and consistency in mapping not only for, but also with their communities. I fully endorse this and we Pacific folks will learn a lot from them. - mapmakerdavid
- I endorse this proposal. – Craig Allan
- I endorse this proposal. – Anne-K.