Introducing Mapathon
Mapathon event, well known as a "mapping marathon" is a modern digital form of volunteering. It is an event, which is accessible to everyone, regardless of age. All what participants need to have is a computer device with a mouse, an internet connection, created account on OpenStreetMap and a willingness to help.
The mapathons used to be usually face-to-face meetings, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic situation were completely all sessions taken to online space. After the COVID-19 pandemic people realized that it is great to organize mapathons in both ways, face-to-face and online at the same time. The reason is that people from around the world could also get an opportunity to join (Fig. 1).
The main aim of mapathon is to map buildings, roads, waterways etc. in areas that are blank on maps or areas that have been damaged by natural disasters (e.g hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, earthquakes) or pandemics. For the purpose of mapping is used the Tasking Manager platform, such as HOT OSM, or Teach OSM).
We will work with the Teach OSM humanitarian platform. The projects ready for mapping are divided on this platform into smaller tasks that can be collaboratively completed by various people at the same time (Fig. 2). In this way, mapathon participants are helping, for example, international humanitarian organizations such as the Red Cross or the Doctors without borders to deliver healthcare or other services to these areas and give assistance to people in need. Besides that, all created changesets and improvements in maps made by volunteers during mapathons help to remote areas in the world with development of disaster risk management and energy management. The brand-new data become open and it means that everyone can use them.
Organizing events of this kind helps to build a stronger community of mappers in the whole world. We would like to mention as an example the global student network YouthMappers created in 2016 in the USA (Fig. 3). This organization already succeeded in building a stronger community of mappers from universities. They currently have more than 5 000 members from 72 countries.
The members of YouthMappers community are also European universities, for example University of Prešov as UNIPO Mappers, Politecnico di Milano as PoliMappers (Fig. 4, 5). It is important to mention that OpenStreetMap currently has more than 8 million contributors. It is a great number, but on the other hand, it is still not enough when we imagine the planet Earth with 7 billion inhabitants. Joining or hosting a mapathon is a fantastic way to meet people of many nationalities from other countries, share ideas, get some more experiences and learn something new.
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