YouthMappers FUTA meetings during the first quarter of the year
Certainly, the year 2020 would go down in history lane as a memorable one, as a result of several events that happened last year. Like many other people in the world, we as a group looked forward to 2020 with so many expectations and well laid out plans which we were able to execute in the first quarter of the year before the pandemic hit Nigeria
With several contingency plans from the government, as an effort to reduce the spread and impact of the virus, so many activities turned out a new leaf, as we were required to hold several meetings online rather than the normal in person meetings we were all used to. However, we were able to adapt and also evolve in a very deciduous manner. We held different meetings to train members of the chapter as a way of refining the skill-set of individual members of the group, using several teleconferencing mediums like Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Jitsi. Workshops were also held in a virtual mode, periodically to keep members abreast about what is needed to be an effective member of YouthMappers.
Remote mapathon activities
Mapathons and mapping parties were also held periodically, and at first, it looked difficult transferring all of that to a virtual space. However, because the group consisted of youths with an adaptable mindset, so we were able to quickly evolve and adapt to the virtual reality of the world made necessary by the pandemic. Remote mapping wasn’t a new reality, as we as a group have been involved in this for a long time, and this was done regularly by members. A field mapping project was also carried out by the chapter members prior to the pandemic, to collect point locations of electricity transformers around FUTA Campus, Akure for electricity planning. The project end goal was to improve electricity availability alerts in the mobile app developed by the E-Detectors Energy Limited.
Fieldwork for electrical planning
YouthMappers at FUTA achieved quite a lot this year, our community members Ademoyero Victor Ayomide, Olanrewaju Michael, Oke Mathew, Akintola Mercy Onaopemipo, Okikiri Favour and Babalola Bukola participated in a data labelling contest as part of the Cloud Native Geospatial Outreach Day sponsored by Planet, Microsoft and Azavea. Out of 231 participants from across the world, Ademoyero Victor won the 3rd Place Labeler prize award, Babalola Oluwabukola won the Top Woman Labeller Prize Award, and Akintola Mercy Onaopemipo and Olanrewaju Michael won the next 5 Top Labeler Prize Award. These outstanding participants were issued certificates for their participation at the end of the event.
Zoom call with HOT Data Quality Interns
In addition, four of our community members--Akintola Mercy, Olanrewaju Michael, Ademoyero Victor and Isreal Bankole were opportune to participate in the 2020 HOT Data Quality Internship program, a programme organized for passionate and enthusiastic OSM (OpenStreetMap) contributors that are willing to acquire skills and provide quality data for disaster management and availability of data for future use. Akintola Mercy Onapemipo (Mercy14846), Isreal Bankola (Heterodyne) and Olanrewaju Michael (Teemi_classic) came out as part of the top 10 contributors in both mapping and validating then Ademoyero Victor (Vickystickz) as one of the top 5 active contributors on the Slack channel.
Furthermore, the chapter massively supported the Nigeria Sustainable Energy 4 All (SE4ALL) program in remote mapathons which were held five times from July through November 2020. Two of our chapter members were awarded mapping champions
thrice during the events and we made in total over 53,000 edits on OSM. The erstwhile chapter Presidents, Dennis Irorere and Emmanuel Jolaiya were part of the program coordinators and mapathon instructors.
Another huge feat we accomplished was the development of a progressive web app for our campus, intended to help with navigation challenges around the campus. This web app was a result of our participation in the #map2020 competition organized by Mapillary. More information can be found on the website repository hosted for free on Github at this link: https://github.com/jeafreezy/FUTA-Campus-Guide.
Finally, as a group, we became more organized and structured, we created the media team, technical team, fieldwork manager, etc. We were able to accomplish these feats this year, as a result of effective collaboration and mutual understanding from every participating member of this amazing group. The pandemic gave us new realities in the world, but we have learned a lot and are still in the active process of learning. We look forward to doing more in the coming year.
Authors:
Nafiu Opeyemi
Department of Remote Sensing and GIS
YouthMapper FUTA erstwhile General Secretary.
Twitter: @Techy_ay
Emmanuel Jolaiya
Department of Remote Sensing and GIS
YouthMapper FUTA erstwhile President.
Twitter: @jeafreezy