Finished!

The Gaza field teams have finished their seven weeks of hard work and they've collected a whole lot of data! 13,706 road segments to be exact, and 2,344 points of interest.

Jeff Haack and Project Coordinator Montaser Bakroun review the data
with mappers Abd Alkareem Aloul and Mohammed Elhessy

Mohammed Elhessy (pictured above) wrote a small software program to help keep track of all the teams work. It enables the guys to run searches and see which teams completed each area and other information about their work. The energy that these guys devoted to this project has been fantastic. They've gone above and beyond what was asked of them.

Having finished the project it was time for some fun on the beach. A special thanks to our kite-making friends in Jordan!

Mapping in An Nuseirat

The "Shebab" (young men) are in the middle area this week, the last area remaining to be mapped. Things are on schedule and going great! We look forward to finishing up this project, and all the guys think it's pretty cool what we've achieved.

Mapping in An Nuseirat

Moving South

With Gaza City and North Gaza 98% complete, our field teams have begun working around Khan Younis and Rafah in the south. The quality of their work has been great, and they've not only collected road names and points of interest, but other detailed information including surface type, width, and number of lanes.

Work in the border areas and in certain difficult neighborhoods has been a concern, but we've had no major safety issues to date. Additionally, as the project has progressed, our mapping teams have grown more and more adept. While we continue to map all urban areas on foot, one of our top mappers is surveying large agricultural areas by car. He also identifies missing data and follows up in those areas. The teams are going strong, and we hope to finish by the end of May!

Ekramy and Mohammed Inputting Field Data

FreeMap Gaza Moves Forward

Gaza

The Gaza map is going great, it seems. With a talented group of young engineers and GIS students, tremendous effort by the University College of Applied Sciences, and a continually improving set of procedures for field work, our data collection is moving forward with no insurmountable complications.

Our teams have been well organized and picked up the OSM technique quickly and easily. Gaza City is nearly finished, and our teams are moving northward this week. After sorting out a myriad of technical issues during the past week, we expect the development of our data set to grow faster and faster.

Currently the GIS unit of the Gaza municipality is working on unifying their geographic data and developing a road management system to anticipate and improve road repairs, and with luck we will soon be able to collaborate on some of our field surveying work.

West Bank Update

The past two weeks our editing team has been hard at work reconciling our field work with road tracings and data provided by our partner organizations. At long last our West Bank data set is reaching completion, and all that remains is to upload the remaining data to the server and do some final verification and assessment.

In the meantime we are pursuing meaningful ways of distributing the data and putting it to use, assessing the procedures implemented in our project, and pushing forward with FreeMap Gaza to complete our data set for all of Palestine.

Hebron returns, as we put our completed data set back up on the FreeMap server

FreeMap Gaza Launched

After an 18 month absence, JumpStart returned to Gaza and received a warm welcome. The mapping initiative has begun with our partners at the University College of Applied Sciences, and our teams have already started to map Gaza city. There's a great deal of under-utilized talent in Gaza, as thousands of university graduates go without work. We're happy to be working with some highly qualified engineers and geographic students in the development of our Gaza map.

Thousands of buildings were destroyed in the recent war, and with no construction materials entering Gaza, structures continue crumbling

Gaza continues to experience the aftershocks of the January war, and it seems like there are daily scuffles, strikes, and tragedies. With few to no reconstruction materials allowed through the borders, the local infrastructure remains in disrepair, and the collapsed buildings are a constant reminder of the situation here.

We hope to finish our map project in Gaza in mid-May even though, as our mapping recruits assure us, nothing is sure in Gaza. With the effort here we'll reach our goal of a free and open data set for all of Palestine, information which can be applied to a wide range of uses in public, private, and non-govermental spheres. As we develop our free Gaza map, we look forward to giving more detail to the already excellent work of the OpenStreetMap crew.

Let the mapping commence!

Engineers and GIS students examine a GPS

Many buildings, including those at the university, were hit during the war

Field Program Manager Jeff Haack with the first teams of mappers

Hebron Lives

While it's been a challenge to coordinate our work using between OpenStreetMap tools and data produced as ESRI shapefiles, we have developed the necessary protocols to get this done.

Although the Hebron region (in the south of West Bank) was the first place to be mapped when we started operating in December, it was taken offline for editing and has been missing from our server for a month. We continue to work on the data offline to properly classify and identify the roads, but today we put the road system up on our FreeMap server.

Developing the data offline from our various resources has proved to be greatly efficient, and we have nearly completed the road system for the Tulkarem and Qalqiliya regions in less than a week.

Hebron roads (not classified)