Organised Editing/Activities/Cymru/Wales Community Climate Culture Layer
Introduction
OpenStreetMap has been used for community-led data insights in emergency and development settings since 2006. Community OpenMapping allows the potential for communities to have a say in their own public health priorities and resource allocation. Local communities can represent ethnicity on OpenStreetMap, making language, practices and community perspectives globally legible, geo-located community-defined assets, traditional placemaking techniques.
This project explores innovative solutions to the challenges of rural depopulation in Wales. By training the local community how to map, the Public Map Platform aims to give voice and agency to people within their indigenous communities on Ynys Mon. This collaborative map platform aims to support the use and visibility of the Welsh language, communicate hyper-local priorities/concerns and celebrate the unique qualities of the area.
Project Objectives
Projects under the Wales UK Mappers banner aim to highlight rural needs, preserve heritage, safeguard an indigenous protected language, and practically connect old and younger generations with their environment and its history.
The personal benefits of OSM participation are an important consideration as a Social Prescribing vehicle improving social inclusion and community/mental health. A key goal of this work is to ensure that communities are engaged in an ongoing and empowering way, to enable the representation of specifically community-derived priorities. Ultimately, agency and authorship of both content and methodology (including tooling) will be embedded within participant skillsets, enabling sustained and sophisticated contributions to ongoing Community Mapping campaigns.
Project Legacy
The legacy of the project is twofold:
- Maps which can be used to inform and enhance decision-making, planning, and social development,
- A Future Generation of citizens capacitated, as a workforce and society, to practically contribute to positive social change, gathering responsible and accurate evidnece, with the confidence that their contribution will have real and lasting impact.
Proposed Field Intervention
A common methodology covers Wales UK Mappers working under two funding streams (Her Arfor language/culture/business funding) and AHRC Public Map Platform. The OpenStreetMap element of the Public Map Platform project adapts practices from community-led initiatives mapping various drawing on the tools used to demonstrate risks and assets in other rurally, isolated and overlooked populations.
Influenced by various OSM Community Mapping projects (e.g.Refugee Settlement Resources mapping: Community Health/Resilence mapping, and the National Library of Wales heritage, cultural memory and welsh language Mapping Land Voices pilot), the project initiates a hybrid methodology, curated around Children and Young Peoples' auto-ethnographic contrinutions to public decision-making. The Wales Institute of Social Economic and Research data is developing a system of OpenSource tooling and data collection methodologies where people below the age required for OSM membership can still contribute to a centrally-controlled public map. Edits to OSM will be uploaded as post-production material, having been processed as youth-related creative environmental input.
It is hoped that these remote and Field Community Mapping contributions can provide a geospatial understanding of Public Life from a child's perspective, where alternative versions of Community Assets, Climate Memory, and Tangible/Intangible heritage in Rural Wales can be understood. Organised editing of the OSM basemap is taking place on the HOT tasking manager, and focus is on designated areas of interest, either dictated by funding constraints and defined by community wishes, or designed around activity events run by academic pratitioners and facilitators (on Ynys Mon).
Public Map Platform PMP: Ynys Mon - Isle of Anglesey
The project will deliver a baseline map against which the Ynys Mon can measure its progress towards a green transition and fulfilment of the Future Generations Act (2015) Wales in a transparent and inclusive way, as well as a model for data collection by Local Authorities across the UK and beyond.
This project also aims to bring simple technical skills to academics and professionals in Wales embeding the unique advantages of OpenStreetMap Community Mapping in their daily practice, bringing lived experience to the institutional policies of publ;ic, private and third sector stakeholders: towards understanding a 'deep-map' of community values in Wales.
Whilst creating a national resource for better data-science analysis (enabling increasingly devolved decision-making), the project aims to use OSM as a future-proof platform for sustained community participation, empowerment and activism, and as a paradigm for digitising site-specific hyper-local assets as bound-up in addressing, place-naming and belonging traditions celebrated within the welsh national character.
Ynys Mon/The Isle of Anglesey will be used as as a test case for further projects, intended to be scaled into other regions of the UK.
Coordination:
The PMP project is jointly coordinated by Rupert Allan @rupertmaesglas and Scott Orford @doctorfrost of WISERD (Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research and Data - https://wiserd.ac.uk/)
Background
This is part of a green transitions project, bringing together multiple layers of spatial information to give a social, environmental, cultural and economic picture of what is happening in a neighbourhood, area, local authority, region or nation. The map layers will be constantly growing in information and sophistication, reconfigured according to local policy and boundaries. Most importantly they will be developed and monitored with and by a representative cross section of the local community.
OpenStreetMap as a collaborative platform allows for the global network of local communities to help each other in social cohesion, multi-ethnic visibility and social justice projects. This potential ties-in with the longer-term (sustainability, inclusivity, resilience) agenda of the Wellbeing of Future Generations Wales Act. The use of reciprocal international knowledge-sharing allows comparative study and lesson-sharing across cultures.
Field/Remote Methodology
The co-creation of survey forms capable of multimedia components (free text/story, Video, Sound Recording and Photograph, and (hopefully) sketch) will be undertaken by community engagement facilitators OFFLINE, with focus on the different layers in mind. This will be iterative and re-iterative, with feedback and co-devising altering and updating bespoke questions and interrogatory frameworks.
Cultural Team Creative OSM use
The PMP Cultural Team are leading the interactive OpenData process, creatively using OpenStreetMap technology, tools and practices to explore site-specific and place-based counter-mapping and psycho-geographic possibilities, as well as recording creative heritage as found embedded in Welsh landscapes. This includes graveyard artistry (the tradition of grave poems (Englynion)), taxonomic landuse queries in Overpass, etc.
Community Engagement Workshops
These will take the form of traditional focus group/activity group practices, but it is hoped, over time, that the performative, site-specific creative-empathic qualities of proven Community-Led Mapping practice will be adopted by project practitioners as a process, rather than as a monitoring/evaluation tool.
A mobile installation will be toured during the summer, in order to engage community members (children) in perceptual geographic experiences, and feedback will be processed with validated elements to be processed as OSM input. Data cleaning will be undertaken by WISERD, so that any OSM conventions (physical geography) can get uploaded appropriately ("Reality"), and creative/anecdotal/geo-mobile and 'qualitative' ephemeral data can be shown on uMap and QGIS layers ("Perception") in co-curated maps.
Training of Public Mapping Platform trainers:
Remote-mapping (Tutorial) by local and global community, followed by community interest groups, who are learning, workshopping and applying established field-mapping techniques of StreetComplete(basic) and ODK(advanced) surveying, as increasingly specific/bespoke community profiling data is identified. Housing stock data is the baseline, with heritage, tourism, and green spaces/environment as human-centred themes.
Participants will seek to put site-specific observations into context, resource allocation to Social Inclusion, Cultural Territories, Belonging, and general "Placemaking" themes consequential to the Wellbeing of Future Generations in Wales. It is an intervention to promote the capacity for communities to have a say in their own public health administration, cultural representation, and resource allocation. The primary aim, through the production of Creative Commons in the public domain, is capacity-building.
Organised Remote Mapping: HOT Tasking Manager Hashtags
#cydnerthedd #resilience #GreenWales #hotosm-project-16144 #hotosm-project-16143 #hotosm-project-16141 #hotosm-project-15943
Proposed Layers - "Public Map Platform":
a) Social map layers will be co-created with C+YP, an example being a map of where people connect with one another; Maps convening community-gathered multi-sector resources/asset data can be modeled on visualisations such as this: http://umap.openstreetmap.fr/en/map/map-of-arua-sub-counties-showing-health-centres-sh_264100#10/2.7229/30.9897
b) Cultural map layers will be co-created with C +YP, an example being a map of cultural heritage; this can draw on the Mapping Land Voices project pilot: https://blog.library.wales/mapping-land-voices/, and the Royal Scientific Society "Community-Mapping Climate Memory" project: Organised Editing/Activities/OSMJordan Community-Mapping Climate Memory Al Azraq#Mapping climate memory and well-being in multi-ethnic migrant communities of Al Azraq desert oasis, Jordan.
c) Environmental map layers co-created with C+YP; an example being places that flood, or where air-quality is important factor; this should be based on OSM Air Quality projects (https://sensor.community/en/) and citizen-memory drain and flood-mapping methodologies deployed in other global settings: (e.g. Ggaba: https://opendri.org/uganda-open-mapping-for-resilience-completes-ggaba-parish-pilot/ and Dar Es Salam: https://www.hotosm.org/updates/what-we-learnt-from-mapping-african-megacity-dar-es-salaam/)
d) Census and administrative data map layers built out of existing data sets will be collated & interrogated. Data conflation: WISERD
Priorities:
Grant intention: to "Create a customisable model for community engagement in planning for the green transition"
During the last two years, factors like Brexit and COVID have highlighted socio-economic vulnerabilities which were previously hidden in the countries of the UK. Rural areas in Wales have long-standing designations as areas of Multiple Deprivation, and can heavily benefit from Community Development increasingly acknowledged as critical. Developing countries have been the subject of attention from the OpenSource digital revolution, because of the free, sustainable and inclusive participatory methodologies developed. Countries neglected by this, and arguably suffering from disempowerment, community malaise and administrative complacency can arguably be found within the British Isles.
Comms:
Rachel Hughes
Timeframe:
The timeframe for this project is three to 20 months, with a view to longer-term expansion/scaling.
Initial AOI (Geographical Area of Interest)
Communed Mapio Agor/OpenMapping Ynys Mon: Tasks https://tasks.hotosm.org/manage/projects/15943 https://tasks.hotosm.org/manage/projects/16141 https://tasks.hotosm.org/manage/projects/16143 https://tasks.hotosm.org/manage/projects/16144
Mapping Considerations
- Please do NOT edit roads remotely without specific reference to coordination referents
- 2 workflows should be clearly available to the task - one in JOSM and one in iD. NB: It is important to conventionalise across the UK, map in accordance with OSM Cymru and the Valleys context, and most of all, make sure that new mappers in the community can contribute. The use of ID, despite terrace-mapping being slow, will be important.
- Terraces: Addressing - for International Contributors: Terraces in Wales are ‘artificially-imposed’ terraces, built in an ordered way. The Bing imagery is high quality, and shows long singular built terrace structures. These comprise rows of dwellings and, for this, the mapping conventions of roads and house numbers/names should prevail. The preference on UK houses is an individual polygon per house.
- Terraces: Tracing/Tagging: All residential buildings need to be digitised, using iD or JOSM, with the tag: 'building=house', then 'house=terraced'. Difference in tile colour/texture (and chimney stacks) should be used as trustworthy indicators of dwelling boundaries.
- Terraces: For (the very few)areas where a terrace exists separately (named) from the road, refer to http://sk53-osm.blogspot.com/2020/06/housing-terraces-in-wales-minor.html for context, and proceed with caution. (‘Store the name of the terrace in addr:housename and the name of the road in addr:street. (This is actually what Royal Mail do in their address file).’)
- Validation: To be undertaken by WISERD, Project Team, Missing Maps, and requested from OSM UK
Garden Plots/Boundaries
The UK Ordnance Survey cadastral layer (available in iD and JOSM) allows the second pass of mappers to experience the useful tool available in iD and JOSM, where blue lines may be used to trace over. The cover is not comprehensive, rather it is indicative of conventions to be guided-by. This can be seen in a 30 Second Video - Cadastral Layer in iD: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_oF5ctTgzaZGlZy0ADzhsHA5akdTOkn9/view?usp=sharing
Open/Communal Areas:
Green Spaces etc are seen to be both assets and risks in certain contexts in Wales, with open air welfare and livelihood enabled, but also the lack of shelter being a risk factor.
Footpaths
Footpaths, bridges, alleyways are important to outdoor access and wellbeing, with current rights of access challenged by proposed changes in Footpath upkeep/access in progress.
Waterways:
Waterways equally are cultural and community assets, and access to these is important to delineate.
Training Materials/Technical:
Tutorials Spreadsheet:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Grg5AXqxE-XGmjCWbaqqT6_RivYGzW2cc-HmnxN1Npg/edit#gid=0
- Mobile Tools:
Kobo Collect, StreetComplete, limited OSMAND, Smartphone video capture: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1aCu8RUOlxVlFakM5c20gkgkmEwVaSI_rMqpPcOunIEs/edit?usp=sharing
- Desktop Tools:
uMap Offline
ID Editor, JOSM Terracer plugin to be used where necessary on terraced houses: JOSM/Plugins/Terracer
Data Cleaning Workflow
- Link: OSM Uganda Data Cleaning Workflow
Analytics:
Changesets to be seen via OSM Anaytics/OSMCha/OhSOME
Data Model TBC - WISERD
Data Model (Appendix 1): (WISERD)
==Associated/Comparative Projects==
Mapio Lleisiau'r Tir - Mapping Land Voices: Ucheldir Cambrian Uplands
This project is adult-focussed, creating a folk-history, cultural fabric and language layer in OpenStreetMap. Focusing on the erosion of culture and language, this works to create practical maps as a public 'community archive', for use on community/small business websites, Wikipedia, and OpenStreetMap.
Advocacy has been organised around farming traditions, food production/supply/waste, small industry/businesses, technological heritage and land-working. As an 'upskilling' and community empowerment project, it will embed practical “Community Mapping” skills within local businesses, community groups and farming communities, whilst recording land-based skills, history, and lived experience, using Welsh language and reference in our area.
Using OpenStreetMap in combination with Wikimedia Commons, phase one looks to establish some 'story-mapping' process, using this as a vehicle for communty feedback on use of maps for more quantitative practical socio-economic insights. Field Papers and point of interest mapping are combined with desktop editing in the community. A series of workshops training OSM tools to young and old generations intends a practice- based exploration of community mapping needs.
Through this kind of hands-on practice-based education, the project tackles rural depopulation, mental health, ‘brain-drain’ and heritage loss, whilst creating a public archive of resources, assets and absences in rural communities (e.g. small industry, technical history sites, shops, food-resource, employers, community centres, heritage, transport services/gaps, employment barriers). The aim is to enable and empower building of an OSM community in Wales, using community maps to showcase assets and prioritise risks on their own terms and in their own language.