Building validation project with American Red Cross
American Red Cross (ARC) has supported Missing Maps since 2014 and also run many projects in MapSwipe in the past years. Following the Haiti change detection pilots, Dan Joseph (Data Tech Lead at ARC) got in contact with Johnny and shared some ideas around MapSwipe use cases for ARC and possible funding opportunities.
ARC would like to be able to use a MapSwipe project to obtain a quantitative measure of the quality of the mapped buildings in a given area of interest. Their immediate use case being to analyze the buildings in areas mapped via Tasking Manager projects. They have funding available that will allow us to create the necessary components and guidance to conduct ‘building footprint review’ projects in MapSwipe.
For us (@Johnny, @Laurent Savaete , @Benni ) it seems that this funding opportunity aligned really well with the overall MapSwipe plans to support building footprint validation projects. We initially thought more about machine learning based building footprint detections, but checking the quality of OSM building footprints might be as relevant and is still very similar. It also provides an easier first step towards more complex workflows which would involve machine learning.
The project contract will be set up between American Red Cross and HeiGIT. It has not been possible to use Open Collective for this project, as it doesn’t seem to be working with contractual work requirements at ARC. As the funding is only available when spent within this year, we also needed to act quickly. HeiGIT is planning to subcontract Johnny and Laurent to do work on design and client development.
Jorieke Vyncke Thu 28 Oct 2021 8:47AM
On the project contract, my preference would be to have all in our collectibr, but yes please go for whatever works. Both AmCross and HeiGIT are trusted partners I'd say ;-)
What contractual requirements do they request?
Dan Mon 1 Nov 2021 7:58PM
Does "collectibr" mean through Open Collective? To transfer money we require a contract that has a defined outcome, and it has to be with a legal entity (either an individual or organization/company). The contract for the work described above - is deliverable based with fixed payments based on completion of criteria. All work will be carried out on the main MapSwipe code repositories on GitHub, and released under the same open source Apache License 2.0 as is currently applied to the project components. For payment, the project must be successfully completed in calendar year 2021 because that is the availability of the budget source for the work.
Andrew Tue 2 Nov 2021 8:04PM
Sounds exciting.
Great that American Red Cross and HeiGIT can contract and then subcontract to others.
This makes sense as MapSwipe itself is set up to avoid any contractual risk directly and still take donations to keep it's core running.
Andrew Tue 2 Nov 2021 8:29PM
Really appreciate Loomio and the MapSwipe community being updated with this.
Thank you and more appreciated as it evolves.
Jorieke Vyncke Sat 6 Nov 2021 12:15PM
Many thanks for explaining Dan.
Really exciting, I'm looking forward to see the outcome!
Jorieke Vyncke · Thu 28 Oct 2021 8:44AM
Really exciting to hear that AmCross would have funds for the building footprint project! Would the funding allow for it to be fully finalized within a certain time frame?