Getting humanitarian mappers to the map faster
By: Mikel Maron
Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) just released the new version of the Tasking Manager, which helps to coordinate mapping in OpenStreetMap. I wanted to learn more about what it took to build a new version of this critical tool, so I connected with the Tasking Manager’s lead developer, Felix Delattre.
Felix, congrats on launching Tasking Manager 4! For people who don’t know, in a couple sentences what does the Tasking Manager do and why is it important?
Mappers around the world use the Tasking Manager to team up and map in OpenStreetMap. It divides up a large area of interest into many smaller mapping tasks that individual mappers can ‘check out’ to complete. For Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, the Tasking Manager is fundamental to how we coordinate volunteers as they create map data for humanitarian organizations and crisis response.
The Tasking Manager has 10 years of history and a highly engaged community of users — how, and why, did you take on a new version? Weren’t 1, 2, and 3 enough? ;)
Version 4 has been a complete rewrite of the frontend to support a new design based on extensive user experience discovery. We completely rethought the whole mapping experience for users of the tasking manager. Goals were to improve the flow and make it easier to find tasks, so we could get people to the map more quickly.
Our users and the wider OpenStreetMap community was central to our redesign process. We made our plans transparent, invited open discussion with the HOT and OpenStreetMap communities in our source code repository and online chats, welcomed constructive arguments, processed a lot of feedback, and held regular meetings every week.
Technically, programming libraries move fast and we wanted to stay up to date. The user interface in version 3 used a framework that is no longer developed. We’re now using React. On the backend, Version 4 retains much of the previous version which has made upgrades easy, but we did clean up the code to make it easier for programmers to contribute in the future.
What’s your favorite new feature in TM4?
The Tasking Manager now directly includes the iD editor, the most popular editor for mapping on OpenStreetMap. Previously, mappers needed to load iD in another browser tab. We are now able to provide a seamless experience for the user without the need for tricky jumps between applications.
Also we added Teams, making it a lot easier to coordinate a group of mappers. Groups of users can be assigned projects and tasks, and be granted permissions to map, validate, and create projects.
What worried you most about leading this project into another version?
The timeline. And indeed, we completely underestimated the time it takes us not only to write the code, but also to set our plans in the right direction, while taking into consideration the wide variety of interests and needs of our users and partners. We wanted everyone who wanted to participate to be able to take part and express themselves.
That said, Tasking Manager 4 was ready when it was finished. And fortunately, we didn’t hit any insurmountable challenges and were able to roll out the new version smoothly.
This is the result of many people’s efforts, from conception and scoping, to building, to testing and feedback, and of course funding — who all contributed to make this happen?
Hundreds of people have been involved. Large parts of the HOT Tech team concentrated on the Tasking Manager for one year. It was probably the largest software development project ever done internally in our organization. We saw remarkable work by the development team and several members of the open source contributors as well. We also had amazing support from the HOT communications team, who produced wonderful videos, and worked with us on the wording of the application’s user interface.
We launched with 15 language translations made by over sixty contributors. Over eighty people from Missing Maps events and the wider OpenStreetMap community participated in our extensive testing phase for over four months. The learnOSM.org team prepared user manuals.
Many thanks as well to Microsoft Philanthropies, who made this development possible through their partnership in the AI for Humanitarian Action programme. All the improvements to the UI will enable more experimentation with machine learning, to enhance the experience of human mappers in the Tasking Manager.
Nice to see the global visualization and selections of tasks powered by Mapbox GL JS. Any suggestions for features that would be useful to the OpenStreetMap community?
We chose Mapbox GL JS because we know it well and knew it would meet our needs. It was easy to integrate into the application and improved the display of the maps in the Tasking Manager considerably. And Mapbox generously donates the tile usage of HOT’s Tasking Manager as part of wider support to HOT and OpenStreetMap.
It would be very useful if there was a Mapbox style that included all of the OpenStreetMap data relevant for humanitarian response. This way, in the Tasking Manager we could show the data as close as possible to what is in the OpenStreetMap database and make it easier for mappers to quickly assess what is needed or missing just by looking at the base map. I’d also love to see more projects that use the Tasking Manager outside of HOT form partnerships with Mapbox Community.
Any closing thoughts?
The Tasking Manager is more than just software. It is a tool used by many people, and in my opinion, the people improving, maintaining and especially using it are the foundation of everything. That means it’s very important to build a strong engineering team, and support the ever-growing community of users and developers who can contribute to the continuous evolution of this tool.
Congrats again HOT and Felix, and thanks for sharing the experience. Check out the new Tasking Manager to contribute map data to OpenStreetMap. And you can contribute with code, help with translation, or join the learnOSM.org initiative to help others with documentation. Get in touch with their team on the #tasking-manager channel of HOT’s Slack.
Maps feature data from Mapbox and OpenStreetMap and their data partners.
HOT’s Tasking Manager 4: How we built it was originally published in maps for developers on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.