24 hour mapathon - a huge day!

27 November 2016 | RustyB & DeBigC

Friday the 18th of November 2016 was another huge day for #MapLesotho. At 8am that morning the starter’s gun was fired for 24 hours of mapping in Portmarnock Community School.

A similar event took place a year ago in the school, but this year it was always going to be a bigger event because 200 children submitted sponsorship cards, full of pledges from their families and friends so long as they could stay awake the whole day and make the openstreetmap databases of Lesotho light up with activity. Also this year there is a mapping club at the school.

A slight pause in mapping took place at 11.30 while the mappers assembled to hear lightening talks from DeBigC, notinblue43, Tshedy, DaCorr and Peter Cranny of the National Transportation Authority of Ireland.

Back on the OSM server the day was a dramatic on with 229 contributors, of which 205 were pupils in the school. The others were our friends in Lesotho, and while they had a good connection the children of Ha Hlalele school in Maseru. Altogether 497,516 nodes were made, which was so close to the BHAG of half a million set by the mapping club that we all celebrated anyway. With bleary eyes obviously 😜.

At the end of the day this created 462k new nodes to add to the total of 13.7 million that is tracked by Søren Johannessen (link). Of course this is an increase of 3.6% in the number of nodes in the map. In one day!

In the bigger context this was one of almost 100 events in the world being organised for #osmgeoweek. The kids once again did themselves proud.

At #MapLesotho we’ve been tracking user contributions since February 2015. We arranged a special board for the mapathon. See how everyone got on through the mapathon.

Checkout the board

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