May give an incorrect connotation of what we're trying to discuss here. It's how do we work better together and not necessarily rely on some of the red tape or contracts or other issues that can come with Partnership versus collaboration. And so the panel today is going to discuss lessons learned opportunities and maybe what we could all do better.

In order to collaborate amongst the different groups. We have representatives from USGS from the State Department map give and also from Max are talking about the open data program. I know we are running just a few minutes behind But I'm only saying that because I bet somebody that that would happen. And I'm going to cash in on it at some point soon.

So I want to get right into it and give all of our panelists a chance to introduce themselves to talk about Their interactions with either the public or the private world. And then we'll have opportunity in for some questions, answers and discussion. So first I'm going to introduce Aaron course, who is part of the TNM corpse over USGS Aaron handle view.

Okay, great. Can you hear me and see me. Okay, awesome. And thanks a lot for having us. I'm Aaron chorus. I work at the USGS at the National geospatial technical operations center.

I've been there for 10 years and I've worked on crowdsourcing for most of that time. I'm currently the project lead for the national map core, which is our crowdsourcing effort. For the national map. So I'm going to just give an overview of national map core what we do and talk a little bit about the ways we've worked with OSM in the past.

So like I said, national map core is crowdsourcing for the national map. So hopefully everyone's familiar with the national map. National map has a lot of data public domain data that is downloadable and we also produce the US Topo maps, which are a signature product for the USGS

Similar to open street map, but a much more limited scope and much more controlled editing and we have volunteers editing and all 50 states Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands.

Currently it's focused on structures collection. So those are point features for buildings. And like I said, we have a pretty limited scope. So the types of features we collect are what you'd want to see on the US Topo map so important community anchor point types of features schools emergency response, such as fire stations and law enforcement hospitals.

Some government features cemeteries post offices. That sort of stuff. And so again, the US Topo maps are updated every three years. And so we've been working towards a complete consistent accurate data set for that limited set of features.

And most importantly, the data is public domain. So the data is available to anyone to download and use however they please. Um, the project. Our project has been successful in part due to our really simple collection criteria.

Really clear guidelines online very limited information we're asking for and specific so name and location are the only required information and volunteers are placing points based on aerial imagery in our application and they can also provide address information. We

have a tiered editing approach. So anyone can sign up right away, start editing. We have peer reviewers check those editors points. So it goes through a second review those volunteers have been vetted. So they have we've reviewed their data and granted them that role. We also have advanced editors who

Have a lot of experience and very high quality data and their data can bypass peer review. So it doesn't have to be reviewed by anyone and we get very high quality data through that process. We do quality monitoring. So we check volunteers points new editors especially provide feedback. If we see any issues.

And we see coming out of even that first stage, the standard editor editor first tier. We see 94% quality or better for location and name.

And I know I'm kind of getting short on time. So I'll just say We have over 600,000 volunteer contributions and we've had 2500 people contribute since 2016 In terms of how we've worked with OSM and the early days we worked with OSM quite a

bit. Jim McAndrews was one of the first developers that worked on this project when he was at USGS And during our pilot projects we used Open Street Map editors that we customize a potlatch and awesome. And then our primary application that we used until 2016 was a customized potlatch to application.

We went to an internally developed application in 2016 to improve our processes and speed up the integration of volunteers edits into our databases. And that's a combo of open source and proprietary software. In terms of working with OSM, the primary barrier to collaboration has

been incompatible data licenses. The fact that we're public domain has caused some Has been a bit of a hindrance to collaborating. However, we're currently trying to reconnect with the OSM community and talking to them to do a possible pilot and I'm going to be quiet because I think I've hit my time and Greg's going to talk more about that. So

Yes, I was gonna say that was a perfect segue. When we get to Greg at the end to talk about some of the barriers and kind of revisiting. There's a lot of good, good content there. And some good hopefully things people are thinking about to ask some questions. What I want to do is pivot over to Erica Nunez from Mapkin

To now also talk about from a different perspective, how that agency is working with Open Street Map and working with a community that also contributes back to it. Erica. Hi. Thank you, Josh. I wanted to really quickly say that I'm really happy to be speaking with everyone today because it was actually Getting sent to a state of the map us conference, a handful of years ago in DC that really opened my

eyes to the potential around open mapping. So it's always very nice to come back and it feels very full circle. But, but my name is Erica Nunez and I'm a humanitarian research analyst and then I've been embedded in the US Department of State's Office of the Geographer and its humanitarian information unit for more than a few years now.

And I've been working with them on advancing a department wide initiative that they manage called the map give initiative. And so for anyone that doesn't know the map give initiative is a US Department of State public diplomacy initiative that launched in 2014 that

specifically encourages and increases participation in the global mapping community open mapping community and helps to facilitate the creation of geographic data to support humanitarian relief and development programs specifically And so a lot of what we do is build bridges between the State

Department, which obviously have a global reach and with its resources and programming and personnel. We build bridges between the department and the open mapping community to find opportunities where we can constructively contribute towards humanitarian and development efforts. And since the theme of our panel is a private public collaboration, I'll quickly plug that it's been interesting.

We launched back in 2014 and as the private sector is increasingly involved or increasingly interested in open mapping, we, you know, there are obviously there are more opportunities there for us to make to make connections and making connections is

Very central to our mission. And so I might just quickly describe the three main avenues that we take to To approach our work and hopefully that'll make it clear how important network building and relationship building Really is to us. And so the first thing that we do is we try to leverage whatever unique capabilities, the

State Department has to try to strengthen the open up communities efforts. And so the clearest example of this is through our Through the crowd program where we share updated high res satellite imagery through licenses that we have. And we could have a whole separate panel on that. But

For the sake of gravity. I'll continue. So we, second of all, we help the State Department organized events with local communities for that are centered around mapping. We've helped organize dozens of mapathons Around the world and US based universities as well. Just because they're great opportunities to get local government students, teachers,

professional international organizations, you know, private companies, anybody with a genuine interest. In the room and working on the same cause. And the third thing that we do is we very intentionally work to identify

And create short and long term opportunities where open mapping can exist can support existing State Department programs and goals. And so we've done that pretty successfully by trying to integrate open mapping into Existing stem and education related events and projects. So we've, for instance, I should

say projects and programs. And for instance, not give we've helped connect to connect The YALI the young African leaders initiative alumni with open mapping. We've worked with the Americans with the American spaces.

Specifically in El Salvador to bring open mapping into existing stem programs that they had for high school girls. In previous years we've participated in things like women in science steam camps and tech camps in different parts of the world. And so we're really And so we're really working on identifying opportunities within the department. And so this

is to say there's enormous potential here. And so we have a huge incentive to To be well informed on existing projects and on, you know, sort of exciting developments in the open mapping and GIS community and to have this really robust network. And our, you know, internal and external data diplomacy really depends on it. And we'll say that one of the questions that we still frequently get is

To the quality and the reliability of crowdsourcing open data. I mean, it's clear that's a value that that data needs to be reliable. And so we definitely share everyone's goal of wanting to be sure that there's good quality data and open street map.

And because we have this this relationship with Maxar because we know the people we've worked We've worked with them in conferences like these and we have this existing relationship, we were able to talk with them about what tools they had available at the beginning of this summer, we were able to talk to them what about what they are doing.

You know, as everyone was pivoting towards responding to COVID-19 and we ended up having these really regular conversations about machine learning and map-a-thons and we were able to just explore the possibilities About how to incorporate it into our plans and we ended up reaching out to PEPFAR and connecting

Machine learning tools that Maxar had available to them that were specific to data quality and OSM priority areas for PEPFAR Which focuses on public health priority areas for them in Nigeria, and we were able

to create an event where we pointed students in Nigeria and the United States and Our, you know, classic map-a-thon audience and our US Embassy counterparts, we were able to point them towards an event to work on Work on projects that would directly contribute to data quality and OSM and so

And so that was a really educational experience for us. And it was really helpful because it's in having these conversations and in being open and accessible and available to each other. That we're able to, you know, get from not just point A to point B, but point A to point Z, like you always find these

You know, you always get to unexpected conversations and just by starting off. And so I wanted a big takeaway of this quick Presentation to you all to be that we just because we are part of the US State Department doesn't mean that we're always looking abroad, we are And it doesn't mean that we are inaccessible. We are very happy and eager to be well connected with

With as much of the open mapping community as possible. And with that, I'll let it go to the next person. It's really nice to really nice to be here with everyone today. Thanks, Erica. And that was a perfect segue To introduce Madison Musgrave from Maxar who I know that you worked with on that map-a-thon and you're right.

You bring up things like coordination, communication, networking, how do we You know, engage and kind of reach across and make those connections. This was one way that that did happen. And so, Madison, I'm going to hand it over to you. And I know you're going to discuss From a different perspective from the private side of how contributions being made to OSM and the community.

Great. Thank you, Josh. Thanks for having me here today. I don't think you all can probably tell, but I'm rocking. Oh, yeah. I'm rocking my state of the map shirt from last year. So I wish we could all be together, but I am excited that we have this new

Forum to discuss. So as Josh said, my name is Madison Musgrave and I am the Sustainable Development Goals Specialist at Maxar. Many of you may be familiar with Maxar. We are a large satellite imagery provider and we provide many of the different base map options that are

You have created some awesome features using our imagery as the source data. So at Maxar, I'm a part of our sustainable development team where we focus on working with NGOs and nonprofits that integrate our imagery and data Into their different programs with the goal of trying to meet the United Nations sustainable development goals.

And I'm also the coordinator of the open data program, which is what I'm here to talk to you all about today. So the open data program was formed in 2017 and we wanted to create a way to better serve the humanitarian community that was responding to natural disasters.

So that was our primary goal when we created the program was to remove those barriers to get the imagery and the data out there quickly so that Organizations would be able to better utilize the data. We also wanted to create a community of geospatial excellence around disaster preparedness and response.

And I really feel like we have done those two things in the creation and, you know, ongoing actions of the open data program. So With the open data program we release data in two kinds of events either sudden onset natural disasters, which may include hurricanes, wildfires, tsunamis, earthquakes, things that I feel like are happening more and more often in 2020

So for sudden onset natural disasters. For sudden onset natural disasters organizations may use our data to

To analyze how the extent of the natural disasters, they can use the pre and post event comparison to understand, you know, how many structures were damages what roads are inaccessible. Making use the imagery to plan egress and ingress routes to deliver supplies and to deliver aid and to better plan for natural disasters in the future.

The other kind of events that we have activated board is pandemic. So we did activate And released an extensive amount of information for the Ebola outbreak in 2018 and then we have released and a very significant amount of data for the coven 19 pandemic.

So for those kinds of disasters organizations are using our imagery to better understand Where in this community could place a field hospital. How far are people in this community located from health services, what would be the best way that we could best deliver supplies to reach the most amount of people.

In some communities, they were using it to analyze where isolation center should be set up or how the different communities can best implement social distancing measures and other protocols that are necessary to combat coven 19 So those are the two kinds of events that we generally activate for and

the full activation protocol is available on our site. Anybody is interested in seeing You know, the full gamut of all the steps that we go through that is available on mass r.com slash open data and I think Maggie will be sharing that out as well. But what you are interested in is the data itself. So at a minimum, we always post pre and post event satellite imagery for every single event.

That will be delivered to the site as a three band can sharpen cloud optimized geo tips that imagery is available on the site in perpetuity. So after an event ends or, you know, years later that imagery is still available.

So if you want to go back and do some kind of analysis on a certain kind of natural disaster that imagery is still there on the site. It doesn't go away. And I do want to mention that all of the data that is available on Max ours open data program does have an OSM exception, which means that it is able to be posted and used in OSM.

Sometimes we do use other kinds of data like building footprints roads vector analysis damage analysis hot maps. We are data for wildfires or weather reports. And the last point I really want to mention is the one of the really exciting things about the open data program is flexibility and fluidity.

And our ability to try new things. So as Erica mentioned earlier this year, we were able to provide machine learning data that we created in Nigeria that had some of these key health features that organizations providing Outreach in Nigeria to the covered 19 pandemic will be interested in this data was ready to be integrated and evaluated by open street map users and

Yeah, with that, I'm going to hand it back over because I know we're short on time. But if anybody wants to connect with me and talking more about the open data program always happy to talk about it. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you, Madison was, I think what you were leading to is what Erica spoke of as well as that partnership of being able to Run that map upon having the vectors available to imagery available and even the crowd and kind of being able to bring the peanut butter and chocolate together. I want to now pivot over to Greg Matthews also from USGS and so Greg is not going to talk about

Project or anything else. Greg is going to come give us some perspective and Well, Greg and are talking if anyone has questions they want to put in the chat. I think we'll have a few minutes here at the end. But Greg, you know work. I'll let you kind of start and maybe I'll ask you a question

as you go along from the public perspective. How can we work better together. I know that Aaron mentioned Originally with you know the National mapping corporate it was started using OSM then they were pivoted away. Is it hard to now kind of come back as the the well poisoned, if you will, or how much work needs to happen and What can we do better. What can we do to encourage collaboration and not feel that

you have to kind of pivot away from this community loaded questions across the board. I know. Yeah, you know, I'll talk through some of that and I'll hit on those points.

Greg. I think we may have lost your audio there for a second. Okay. Can you hear me. Yes, better now. Okay, good. I also went dark. That was weird sunspots or something. Yeah, I'll speak to to some of those topics and just kind of ramble through this and glad for folks to jump in and interrupt and we can just have a discussion and I

I think I'm mostly maybe partially representing USGS but mostly representing myself and my own what what I've seen throughout the last decade of trying to work within This community and work within crowdsourcing in general at the USGS. So as Aaron was saying we had kind of conceived a project, probably about 11 years ago.

And I was one of the people that helped get that off the ground when street map software stack and that worked honestly really well and we didn't have the capabilities of the time to build our own infrastructure. We had spoken with Steve Coast and others within the community about, you know, the initiative and it was extremely helpful. The community was very

helpful. We had some hop over from OSM community that that got involved in our project early on to help us get off the ground. We ended up doing our own development internally because we had multiple projects, not just the national map

core that were we were needing to support for crowdsourcing so we ended up going with a different source. Kind of complicated, but Anyway, that's where we started. Just working through some of my points here. So even though we were originally working with the OSM software stack, you know, we are project is exactly the same.

And as Aaron described, we go through a kind of a unique two step or two and a half step process. We have a volunteer. We don't know who they are. They don't have to be certified. They don't have to be anything. It doesn't matter who they are. They're allowed to edit in the system. Once they have a certain amount of edits, then they basically

qualify to be a reviewer and they can check other people's edits. So it's a two step process. And then we sit on top of that process and do random statistical sampling to make sure that the data coming out the other end. Always is, you know, meets our internal quality needs, which is extremely important to our program. And because in general within the government environment crowd sourcing has been people have been a little bit skeptical about it.

You know, we try to make the data 94 95% quality or better and it and you know by the time we hit that second review. I can't speak for Aaron, but I believe we're hitting 100% quality with no detectable errors. That's really important to us.

It doesn't have to be that good, but it reflects extremely well on our credit sourcing program. For a second. I was somebody asking a question.

No, we lost your audio there for a second. Right after you said the hundred percent quality. But let me ask you a quick, a quick question. Sure. With those quality metrics. Is that something that is proprietary. Is that something that's relevant to just how your data is conditioned or is that something that could be shared back with the community

at large, you know, and I guess maybe open that up to to others on the panel as well. Yeah, I'll speak to that very quickly. We tried to build into our process early on. To feed this data back to the OSM community. There's a challenge there because any kind of authoritative government data, while it's completely public domain, which

is basically free and clear, you can use it the data any way you want to the challenges. How do you not override other contributions from the broader OSM community. And that's where I think originally we we just didn't have any success. This data can be can be added back to OSM by anybody at any time. We just haven't found

an elegant way to do that. And we would love to close the gap on that if it were possible. So let me let me hit on that really quickly. So I think this is I know we're going to come up close on time and I may cash in the three minutes for Maggie now. How could right in this I guess the, you know, the call to action or the take home point right. How could the

Public private and you know will also call the the independent groups right because public we're kind of saying is a proxy for government and private is, you know, private industry, but there's that third larger community within OSM of just kind of independent

Contributors. Right. And so how can they if they chose to or wanted to, how could they reach out or how could you reach out to them. Because you may have people that enjoy doing this on their own free time that would want to help contribute and put it out the open everyone else to use. How do we kind of break through the barrier to

to do that, or how would you maybe I don't want to put all the pressure of the world on you or calculate on that. Okay. Yeah, I don't know how we completely Happen getting the data sound but You know, Maggie and and USGS that's you know, that's me. And then they're all Dudley from US Department of Transportation and others are working on

Standing up a demonstration of collecting within OSM the OSM environment that that data would be collected to very specific criteria.

And it would potentially go through that same two step process that I was talking about. And it would it would then potentially be subjected to, you know, random statistical sampling to make sure that it meets our quality needs. But if we collect that within the OSM environment we we could apply our own crowdsourcing folks or volunteers, along with the OSM community really big picture here is out the other end. So if you have government

Or with OSM potentially do is you could crowdsource authoritative data. Right. So if you have an authoritative agency sitting on the other end saying yes we certify this for a certain specific use

Then you have crowdsource authoritative data. I don't know if that makes sense to anybody. To me, it's a really big deal if you could basically certify the data at the end. Not quite sure how it syncs back up to OSM yet, but I think we just need to begin investigating. We're talking about again standing up an application to test this we're already talking about it.

Yeah, that's, that's great. And I know that and Maggie, I will give you back at least a minute. I know that There is a government or kind of a Public partnership public enterprise committee that is being stood up and has been stepped by OSM US and you know,

maybe the action is kind of leading the charge there of how do we start to interact and and work together. I haven't seen any questions come up in the chat. So I don't want to necessarily take too much time. I will say that I'd encourage anybody here that's that's listening in. I know Madison put her email out You can definitely find a way to get in touch with us if you have any questions or just email Madison.

I do want to keep, keep them going. We can definitely ask questions in the chat and you can get we are happy to facilitate inform those out in the interest of time and unfortunately we can't

We're going to continue with our regularly scheduled programming.