Hello everyone, I am Matt Gibb and I'm presenting here with my colleagues Dana Stuckey and Dr. Freddie Wills. Dana and I both work at Maxar. Dr. Wills is a professor at Harris-Stowe State University. So really happy to be there and here and we are going to talk about fostering a mapping community in St. Louis.

So mapping and the term geospatial are certainly not new to the St. Louis area. But the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency's announcement to maintain and even grow their presence here with their new campus created in my opinion kind of a geospatial

awakening in this region to the technology and its application and the opportunity that's within it. So this has led to so many great initiatives and partnerships and many exciting headlines as you can see here capturing the momentum between the agency's companies and the educational entities that are here in St. Louis.

Are you with us Freddie? I think we might have lost Freddie.

Yeah, it looks like there's some technical issues. Well, um, we'll try to get him on.

Feel free to keep going. Yeah, we can keep going. So the partnership between Harris-Stowe and NGA has sort of three major goals particularly around three activities. So K through 12 and undergrad course and program development.

Continuing sort of deeper knowledge projects to understand methods to teach, promote, and develop STEM across that entire spectrum of educational levels and

additional research projects between NGA and Harris-Stowe to create and provide additional opportunities to support the development of students in this geospatial field. And this has actually led to the creation of the Geo Hornet Lab,

which is a geospatial lab, if you will, for Harris-Stowe students to gain experience in this field.

So Maxar's academic outreach program was established to inspire students and share technology and advance academic collaboration across multiple levels. We have teams of employees committed to developing and sharing programs at both the K through 12 and university level. Last year our programs reached over 1,400 students and we're hoping this year now that

COVID is slowing down a little bit that we can reach even more. Our partnership with Harris-Stowe is a demonstration of Maxar's commitment to this type of outreach to the St. Louis region and to engaging and growing diversity in our fields of expertise and in our workforce.

So back in March we held an event with Harris-Stowe and the initial overall goals for that event were to grow the community of mappers at Harris-Stowe University, grow the community of mappers in St. Louis by engaging

the high school students and members of the community, and creating a more robust map of St. Louis that can be used for research and planning additional projects in the future. So we did a little research into the OSM community that currently exists in St. Louis.

What we found, just a little bit about that, is there were 400 mappers that have made an edit in St. Louis this year. The most active in St. Louis are also very active throughout the Midwest, you know, ranging from Chicago over to Kansas City. There's a number of Amazon mappers that exist and, you know, mapping in St. Louis as they are throughout the country.

Many people who are mapping in St. Louis are also mapping elsewhere in the U.S. from coast to coast really. But one thing we couldn't find was really any active dialogue either in Slack or on mailing lists, so there didn't seem to be too much coordination among mappers

and active mappers in St. Louis. And thank you to Martijn for the Meet Your Mappers tool, as well as the Disaster Ninja team for helping me figure this out. So the event that we held was done in a hybrid format where we were able to gather some of us together

within the T-REX Center in St. Louis, which is where the GL Hornet Lab is, and other participants were joining us online through Zoom. So we were able to share OSM with 12 students and 11 faculty and staff from the university. We also had seven Maxar staff participating both in the room and online to help answer any questions and contribute to the map.

We're really looking forward to our next event, hopefully over this summer, where these 23 Harris-Stowe participants can contribute to the map and also help us teach the next mappers to grow the community.

So the data, which is obviously an important result from a mapathon, a little bit about that. So the goal for the mapathon was to map 11 different neighborhoods in St. Louis, particularly underserved neighborhoods that run along the edge of the Mississippi River,

sort of just north of the downtown area, and that also runs along sort of a huge industrial area as well. So as a result of the mapathon, we did add 1,000 buildings. Some traced by hand, some were added with the Map with AI plugin that exists in JAWSUM, and that was about a 38% increase in buildings. You can see those highlighted in gold

on the map, and the pre-existing buildings were black. So, you know, obviously a number of buildings is nice, but what can we do to move things forward? It's not all about building counts.

It's not all about how many edits you have. You know, there's a number of ideas that were tossed around as a result of this mapathon. Things for future ideas of accessibility, both physical accessibility and technological accessibility in these neighborhoods, as well as a number of green spaces, mapping those out moving forward. There's still quite a bit to map in the area,

so thanks to OSMUS for letting us use their instance of the Tasking Manager for this. You can contribute to that project. It's project 235 on the Tasking Manager. And so there's a number of future plans and impact moving forward.

Just want to check, did we get Freddy back before I take his slide? I don't think so. He was having trouble getting onto the stage. Alrighty. So there's a number of programs moving forward at Harris-Stowe, particularly around

geospatial technologies and geospatial sciences. So they want to continue innovating those academic programs in partnership with MGA, as well as industry partners like Maxar, workforce development. As a

historically Black college, Harris-Stowe wants to build a pipeline of underrepresented and minority talent in the geoscience industry. And really no better place than St. Louis to do that, given the presence of government agencies and

like I mentioned, a number of industry partners as well. Continuing to engage the community and K-16 students to introduce geospatial applications, both in work and in education. And then continuing progressive contributions, like I mentioned on the last slide in St. Louis

through OpenStreetMap. There's a lot more to map. Yes, we're hoping that our first mapathon was just one in a series of many. Right. So thank you very much. We're happy to present here to you all. Please reach out to us if you have any questions, or if you are an active mapper in the St.

Louis area, please reach out. We'd love to link up.