No offense to the late Stan Lee, but saving the world isn't just for superheroes anymore. In fact, some of today's most prolific do-gooders could be couch potatoes. Roughly 19 globally minded citizens proved that point at Open Data Day on Saturday in Burlington City Hall Auditorium. The event was cohosted by the University of Vermont's Humanitarian Mapping Club and Code for BTV — the local "brigade" of Code for America, a network of technologists and community organizers undertaking projects for the public good. Outfitted with laptops, an internet connection and enough snacks to sustain a dorm-lounge video-game jam, participants spent part of the afternoon mapping buildings on a satellite image of remote Tanzania. The squad ranged in age from teens to seniors and divided fairly equally along gender lines. In the mix were professional technologists, high school students, educators, Code for BTV members and total noobs (e.g., a certain Seven Days writer). Regardless of our level of technical expertise, we would each input details about the number and location of buildings in the designated area. It's information that could be useful to other do-gooders in their on-the-ground fight against female genital mutilation: Knowing the buildings' location could help outreach workers from the Tanzania Development Trust shelter girls in crisis. "An easy video game" is how Noah Ahles, geospatial specialist with UVM's Spatial Analysis Lab, described the process of adding such data to a crowdsourced map of the world called OpenStreetMap. It's "the Wikipedia of maps," he suggested. After a brief PowerPoint-style tutorial from Code for BTV's self-described "mapping nerd" Kendall Fortney, we were soon moving our cursors over hazy images of buildings on our assigned sections of the satellite image, outlining the buildings with mouse clicks and then saving the information. Saving the world, basically. Eventually, specially trained external volunteer validators somewhere in the world would review our work and commit it, or not, to the updated map. Our mission, which focused on buildings in rural Africa, came at the request of an NGO. Other missions might involve mapping all manner of geographical features — roads, rivers, even footpaths — and take place outside group "hacks" like Open Data Day. One could even contribute to OSM from, say, the comfort of one's couch. Fortney is an insights analyst at Burlington-based Social Sentinel and the first Data Innovation Fellow at the Vermont Center for Geographic Information, but…
No offense to the late Stan Lee, but saving the world isn't just for superheroes anymore. In fact, some of today's most prolific do-gooders could be couch potatoes. Roughly 19 globally minded citizens proved that point at Open Data Day on Saturday in Burlington City Hall Auditorium. The event was cohosted by the University of Vermont's Humanitarian Mapping Club and Code for BTV — the local "brigade" of Code for America, a network of technologists and community organizers undertaking projects for the public good. Outfitted with laptops, an internet connection and enough snacks to sustain a dorm-lounge video-game jam, participants spent part of the afternoon mapping buildings on a satellite image of remote Tanzania. The squad ranged in age from teens to seniors and divided fairly equally along gender lines. In the mix were professional technologists, high school students, educators, Code for BTV members and total noobs (e.g., a certain Seven Days writer). Regardless of our level of technical expertise, we would each input details about the number and location of buildings in the designated area. It's information that could be useful to other do-gooders in their on-the-ground fight against female genital mutilation: Knowing the buildings' location could help outreach workers from the Tanzania Development Trust shelter girls in crisis. "An easy video game" is how Noah Ahles, geospatial specialist with UVM's Spatial Analysis Lab, described the process of adding such data to a crowdsourced map of the world called OpenStreetMap. It's "the Wikipedia of maps," he suggested. After a brief PowerPoint-style tutorial from Code for BTV's self-described "mapping nerd" Kendall Fortney, we were soon moving our cursors over hazy images of buildings on our assigned sections of the satellite image, outlining the buildings with mouse clicks and then saving the information. Saving the world, basically. Eventually, specially trained external volunteer validators somewhere in the world would review our work and commit it, or not, to the updated map. Our mission, which focused on buildings in rural Africa, came at the request of an NGO. Other missions might involve mapping all manner of geographical features — roads, rivers, even footpaths — and take place outside group "hacks" like Open Data Day. One could even contribute to OSM from, say, the comfort of one's couch. Fortney is an insights analyst at Burlington-based Social Sentinel and the first Data Innovation Fellow at the Vermont Center for Geographic Information, but…
