Coordination of global impact projects by Volunteers
The community of Volunteers having a global impact via contributions to global encyclopedias and maps.
Challenge
Enable the global community of Volunteers to easily and effectively contribute to popular and ‘open’ platforms (OpenStreetMap, Wikipedia) in such a way as to track community progress, ‘gamify’ individual contributions, and act as facilitators in assisting their communities in contributing as well.
Background
Peace Corps Volunteers often serve in remote locations within a country. They have a unique context of being immersed for 27 months with a particular community, learning the local language, and appreciating local history and geography. This gives the Volunteer a particular appreciation for a community that may not be largely present if at all on these globally open platforms such as Wikipedia and Open Street Map. There are many anecdotes of a Returned Volunteer being the first to write an article in English about that community, village, town, or city on Wikipedia. Still others where entrepreneurial Volunteers take on projects to get local community members involved in contributing local language translations and other missing content to these platforms.
The task here is to make that process both simpler for the Volunteer as an individual, and as a facilitator. Additionally, we think that there might be merit in thinking of the Peace Corps community as a whole, and leveraging the incentive power of gamification and competition to promote further contributions to these platforms. Finally, we wish to have a consistent and impactful set of evidence for how and why these types of projects contribute to the local communities, individuals, and Peace Corps community.
Potential Solutions
Digital maps of the communities that Peace Corps Volunteers serve are often non-existent or incorrect. This leads to decisions by governments and aid organizations based on incorrect data, and a plethora of issues that come when communities are un-mapped. Until recently, Volunteers and their communities often lacked the internet connectivity and/or GIS skills to create, correct and share the digital map data they could create with their deep local knowledge. However now, Peace Corps Volunteers are finding those barriers are going away due to the recent connectivity boom and development of easy-to-use editors of OpenStreetMap.
The challenge now is to raise awareness of OpenStreetMap and motivate volunteers to both offer up their deep local knowledge to the world and train their community members to update the map themselves.