Tasking Manager

Past, Present & Future

By Pierre GIRAUD for HOT Summit 2015

Who Am I?

I'm from France.

I like hiking, skiing, cycling, coding, mapping.

Who Am I?

Developer at

© OpenStreetMap contributors © CartoDB, CartoDB attribution

Who Am I?

OpenStreetMap contributor since January 2008.

What I like to map?

Hiking trails and guideposts.

Who Am I?

HOT Contributor
since 2011

HOT Voting member
since 2012

Tasking Manager

History

How did it start?

Previously, there was:

QualityStreetMap
OSMQA

QA for Quality Assurance

Code written with François Van der Biest

May 2011

Mail from @Kate.

Subject: OSM Tasking Tool

Interested in developping a tool to help coordination of mappers & surveyors in Indonesia.
“OSM has been shown to be an effective collection mechanism for infrastructure data. One thing that is lacking is the ability to coordinate workers surveying in the field or working remotely.

The goal of the OpenStreetMap Tasking Tool is to make it easy for administrators to define collection areas of interest and collection workflows as well as allowing workers to easily determine what areas they should be working on.”

OSMQA to the rescue?

Same principle: area divided into grids.

Forking?

Nope
-> Scope was too different

July 2011

Contract between
HOT and Camptocamp
to build a “Tasking Tool”.

Initial set of features:

  • Job creation
  • Square tiles
  • OSM auth
  • Check in - check out (Lock)
  • Validation

Technology used:

Pyramid framework SQLite

September 2011

Project delivered!

Was that finished?

It was working but features were missing
to have a really useful tool

I decided to continue the work on my own
(with some help from Schuyler Erle).

Features added:

  • Private jobs
  • License agreements
  • Completion pourcentage
  • Stats chart
  • Many more addition or fixes

October 2012

Code moved to HOT OSM organization on github
osm-tasking-manager

Towards Version 2

September 2013

(During the HOT week)

I decided to restart from scratch

Main goals:

  • Better data model
  • PostGIS support
  • i18n - Language support
  • Bigger map
  • Read-only access
  • Improved workflow
  • Improved performances

Late 2013

Need for an educational fork of the Tasking Manager

Required features:

  • Tasks assigments
  • Tasks difficulty rating
  • Customized interface

Spring 2014

A consortium is built up to
fund the project and define its scope

  • GWU George Washington University
  • State HIU Humanitarian Information Unit
  • ARC American Red Cross
  • GFDRR Global Facility for Disaster Reduction & Recovery
  • HOT

First things first: Finish V2

Re-add all features from v1

+ More unit tests

Then add the educational specific features:

  • Assignments
  • Task difficulty
  • Project due date

May - June 2014

V2 - release!

After a important phase of testing.

Where Are We Now?

Current version: 2.10

Release frequency: ~ 1 to 3 months

> 1000 projects

(Created && Mapped!)

21 000+ contributors

~ 15 000 two weeks ago

> 10 000 in Octobre 2014

They talk about it!

On Twitter or on Facebook...

They use it!

ie. they host their own instance

Probably many more ...

Future

Messaging

  • Instant chat messaging
  • Better notification system

Validation

  • More integrated validation
  • Experienced mappers only?

Home page improvements

  • Projects grouped by program/activation

Misc

  • Project area editing
  • Cache improvements
  • Performance improvements
  • Usability improvements (Outreachy summer 2015)
  • Instructions translations

For those wondering,

There's no roadmap.

:-(

Thanks to contributors

Link to github list

@dodobas, @ethan-nelson, @NitikaAgarwal, @elemoine, @danstowell, @bgirardot, @mikelmaron,

And the forgotten ones...

It's Open Source!

You can contribute too.

Code is on Github:
https://github.com/hotosm/osm-tasking-manager2

You know what?

It's not perfect, but

I'm proud!

In case it doesn't work

I'm sorry!

Thank you!

pierre.giraud@camptocamp.com | pgiraud | @pgira

Questions?