News — 18 February, 2019

A community of collaborators for the Tasking Manager

Workshop with the Open Source community around the Tasking Manager

The most used tool for participatory mapping - our Tasking Manager - now has a vision and goals for its development in 2019. Last week, we held a two-day workshop between partners and stakeholders to develop a shared vision for the Tasking Manager. It is exciting to see the Tasking Manager becoming a wide Open Source community effort between volunteer contributors, organizations and companies that are using the Tasking Manager for their mapping efforts.

HOT held the Tasking Manager Stakeholders Workshop in Washington DC on February 7th and 8th with a goal of producing a development roadmap for 2019. The participation ranged from individual high level contributors, representatives and developers of organizations such as the American Red Cross, the World Bank’s Open Cities Initiative and Youth Mappers to companies such as Apple, Critigen, Development Seed, Facebook, Kaart, Major, MapHubs, Microsoft and Radiant Solutions. In this gathering the current main actors using the Tasking Manager for their mapping teams and the most relevant contributors discussed and decided upon the Task Manager’s key development goals and strategies for implementation for 2019.

We used the diversity of the workshop participants to introduce and discuss about priorities and synergies in the development of the Tasking Manager. The main focus will be to implement the functionality to team up users into groups and target better campaigns on the interests and background of the mappers. This year we want to bring in first machine learning workflows to support the project creators and mappers. It is planned to leverage the analysis of metrics and statistics to offer tools for improving mapping projects and data quality. We are currently in an overall analysis around usability and user flows regarding project creation and validation and we are already discovering opportunities for relevant improvements of the Tasking Manager.

In the coming weeks we will break down the tasks for these directions in our repository’s issue queue. Feel free to join us in any of these efforts either by commenting in the issues or connecting to our common Slack channel. We are eager to continue the development in collaboration with an active community and invite everybody to take part in the Open Source project.