Building on Learning: New Updates to Web-based Mapping Tool

In May 2013, USAID officially introduced their Learning Improvement Projects to the Learning Lab community. These projects, funded by USAID’s Office of Learning, Evaluation, and Research, aim to catalyze Agency learning by sharing lessons learned from innovative pilot projects with the hope that promising approaches can be shared, replicated, and scaled up by others for greater impact. USAID, the Knowledge-Driven Microenterprise Development project, and other partners have been hard at work on five different projects and have recently completed major technical upgrades to the Field Papers atlas generation tool.

Field Papers is a web-based mapping tool created by Stamen Design. It allows users to create a map from anywhere in the world (using OpenStreetMap open-source mapping software), print it out, and mark it up with updates using a pen. Users have marked data related to infrastructure, land and water areas, buildings, and natural features. Once the map has been updated, the updated map can be photographed, uploaded back to the Field Papers website, and merged automatically with the original atlas. You only need a computer, printer, digital camera and pen or pencil to capture and share the latest geospatial data with millions of other users around the world.

Read these excerpts from Stamen Design’s blog to learn how you can use Field Papers in your work.

Field Papers is a tool to help you create a multi-page atlas of anywhere in the world. The first version was launched in May of 2012, in partnership with Caerus Associates. In early 2013, we were approached by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to extend Field Papers, and make it more robust.

USAID wanted us to work on the performance of the system. After attempting to use it in the field, they had been hampered by the amount of time it took to make an atlas, seeing some atlases take up to 30 minutes to be created - obviously not good enough. We were thrilled to be given the opportunity to improve it, and we're hoping that Field Papers Version 2 proves much more useful, and encourages broader uptake. While we worked on the infrastructure, we also took the opportunity to make some improvements to the front end of the site, add a couple of new features, and fix some old bugs.

Here's a summary of what's new in Version 2:

Performance

The main work we did on Version 2 was about performance. We installed a queue manager called Celery to make sure all the uploads and atlases were being managed properly and cleanly. We know our improvements worked because the weekly average atlas creation times showed more than a 10x reduction (from over an hour to just under 5 minutes). Not only that, but the number of atlases created per week has also increased, from about 190 in 2013 (prior to this update) to almost 300 each week since.

Designing for delay
I'm not normally a fan of designing around technical constraints, but in this case, I had some fun doing a design sketch of how we could let people know that their atlas was in a queue, and when it would be done. I was desperate to have a "Ding!" sound incorporated into the UI when someone's atlas was "cooked." But! Since Seth did such a good job of improving performance, the design I made was no longer needed. (I remain quietly desperate to use more sound in interaction design.)

New Features

Along with the performance improvements, we took the opportunity to make a bunch of enhancements and fix a couple of niggly bugs, like character encoding.

Copies
Now you can copy an existing atlas with the click of a button. Say you and your street team are working in the same general area, and can basically use the same atlas. You just have to create an atlas once, then your team mates can copy it into their accounts. Copies are also noted in the activity log for each atlas, so you can track them.

Private Atlases
There's a new checkbox in the atlas-making process that lets you mark an atlas as private. You can do this whether you're logged into your account, or using the site anonymously. The only trick is, if you're not logged in, you'd better make sure you record the atlas's URL somewhere, otherwise, you'll never find it again because it won't show up anywhere around the site. (If you are logged in, you'll see it in the page that lists all your atlases, which you can get to by clicking on your username in top right of the nav bar.) 

Maps, Activity, Counts for Things
We knew we wanted to improve how we're showing activity around the site, so, we've added a new map and counts to any page that shows you a list of atlases. Now we can easily see that there are 12,983 atlases in Field Papers (at time of writing), 14 atlases in Collioure, 1,216 atlases were made in May 2013, and awiseman has made 13 atlases, mostly in the Caribbean.

Nearby
There's a new, simple display on the bottom of an atlas page too, labeled "Nearby," to show you atlases that are, well, nearby the one you're looking at. 

OSM Wiki

We're working with USAID to create better How To documentation too, which you can see unfolding on the Field Papers page in the OpenStreetMap wiki. Feel free to chip in if the mood takes you!

So please, have a look around at the new Field Papers Version 2, and enjoy the new features and faster performance. Do let us know if you're using Field Papers on an interesting project too. It's great to hear when people are enjoying it!