The crowdsourcing movement to improve African maps

An initiative in Africa has begun crowdsourcing data from the public in order to banish the frequent “data not found” holes common in the continent’s cartography.

In an article appearing online at Quartz Africa, Chris Stein meets the people at Missing Maps to discuss their MapSwipe smartphone app. Taking data from OpenStreetMap, anyone who wishes to participate can swap through a series of images to identify any objects of note contained within. Once processed by human eyes, anywhere from Malawi to DNC, the results are then fed back to OpenStreetMap where the results, visible to all, are integrated back in.

The article first appeared on Quartz Africa on November 7th, 2016 and can be read in full by clicking here.