Lineo Mothae is an Assistant Physical Planner working in Maseru District Council

On December 22nd, a meeting of the Planning professionals in Lesotho took place at Lehakoe club in Maseru. For the first time in ages, we as planners reflected on the amazing things that are happening with openstreetmap. And especially we want to have a full dataset of building locations from which layout plans could be built in accordence with the Landuse and Settlement Planning Policy (LUSP) that our country had developed with support from Germany.

Now thanks to the friends in Ireland and Pete Masters in London, we have seen what mapathons and crowdsourcing can do! Our outdated maps which would take years and a lot of resources to update and cover the country in a very patchy way. We are now taking the responsibility to coordinate a mapathon here from Lesotho. Our friends should join us, and hopefully with their own mapathons. We would like to see the #MapLesotho rural task light up for a day. We think mappers should start in the North and move South. Then in the second half of the day we need to concentrate on Maseru in the urban task. These tasks are done in part and will be worked on right up until the date.

Please help us. the basemap task has to be worked on with later tasks to giveus a resource to plan layouts and shape our Kingdom and its growing population and expanding economy. Our Friends in Fingal County Council are hosting a Mapathon that day. All the details will be announced on the wiki project once they are agreed.