Belarus is no longer a white spot on HERE maps
Our life is filled with interesting moments and unexpected events. I want to talk about how the inhabitants of small Belarus forced the attention of Nokia Corporation to themselves and what it led to.Prehistory
Before Nokia bought Navteq in the company's phones, the maps of Belarus were quite decent for that time. Navteq did not have these maps and Belarus on the world map became a white spot cut by several international highways. The same problem could be observed wherever Navteq map data was used, for example in Bing. The situation was sad enough, as everyone understood that Belarus is not a strategically important market, and maps for us may appear very, very soon.
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Hope came with the launch of the HERE Map Creator service. On April 23, 2013, a petition was published asking to open the map of Belarus for editing. The author was Jan, at the moment he is one of the most active editors of the map. Only 1374 voices were enough to see the answer from the company. May 7th editing was opened. We got the opportunity to edit the map and actively set to work.
The official response from the team Map Creator (translation)
Greetings,
As you know, of course, Map Creator is still in beta testing. That is why a number of countries where changes can be made are currently limited. Our goal is to open in all countries of the world, and you helped us to set priorities regarding which country to open for editing next!
Good news: thanks to your initiative, Belarus has just been opened for editing!
Please note that satellite images are not always suitable for editing in certain areas:
We are aware that in order to properly create roads on a map, you must see where they actually are. This requires satellite imagery. They provide points of reference to properly draw roads and places.
This may be hard to believe, but at the moment, we have included the most relevant satellite images that we can legally get. We are working on updating the snapshots and combining all the services to use the updated snapshot sets, but this may take some time.
We would be very grateful for reports on insufficiently clear or irrelevant satellite images: Please right-click to open the context menu and select "Report changes in the map." Then click "Miscellaneous" and "Incorrect satellite imagery." Please select the type of problem and provide additional details if possible. This will be of great help for us in identifying the places where satellite images need replacing by collecting and processing these reports.
We are still evaluating ways to validate community editing of a map before approving them for publication in public maps. This is an important part of our quality control process and responsibility for the cards we provide to our customers.
Most of the recent community changes we have made are fairly accurate, which proves the involvement of community members and their love for improving our map data in their regions and cities. However, we’ll find a number of changes where some users make jokes for highways through the lawn of their neighbor and similar inappropriate jokes.
Agree, this is sufficient reason not to indicate the date of publication of changes at this stage. After completing the beta test of Map Creator, the product management team will officially announce the map update cycle for the HERE portal, as well as for mobile devices.
However, your changes will almost instantly be reflected on the map in the community change layer. It takes several minutes for changes to be made and synchronized on all servers. To force a reboot of tiles, you need to change the scale or the visible area.
To activate the community change layer, click the "Select View" drop-down menu in the upper right corner. It can be marked as a "Map", "Satellite" or "Landscape", in accordance with the current map. Then click the "Community Changes" button. Tip: You can use two different browsers to evaluate the effect.
Thank you for supporting Nokia with your knowledge and passion for creating new local maps!
Respectfully,
Ralph, on behalf of
Map Creator Commands
What happened next
Then everything spun at incredible speed. I made my first edits to the map and saw the total number of edits around the country grow. 100, 500, 1000, 2000, and this is during the first hours after opening the service. The next morning, the number of edits reached 13,000, and about 1,300 kilometers of roads were drawn. And we were noticed. A company representative in the letter indicated that he had never seen such results since the inception of the project, and that he was amazed.
The second letter from the team Map Creator (translation)
Reviewing yesterday's statistics for Belarus was very impressed by the Map Creator team and me: The community made more than 13,000 edits and added almost 1,300 kilometers of roads in just one day, and this is really a lot! Thanks again, your support - and I appeal to the whole community - is extraordinary and very much appreciated!
Best regards, Ralph
The very next day, a group was organized in the VC with the aim to somehow unite people and coordinate actions. At the moment in this group there are a little more than 200 people. For convenience, a Russian-language FAQ has been created, which is constantly updated and updated.
Not to mention the fact that on the second day Nokia representatives from Russia contacted us and offered their help. They gave hints on how to draw the map correctly and which parameters are most important. They also said that our zeal was not in vain, and the data will be included in the map as soon as possible. In addition, work on updating satellite images of the territory of Belarus began at an accelerated pace. All this shows that our actions have stirred up the company.
What did all this lead to?
The results of the community for the month are impressive. Over 400 people edit the map. The Belarusians made more than 300,000 edits to the map, drew 25,000 kilometers of roads, thereby surpassing any other country in the number of edits from users. By the number of added POIs, we are still in third place, but this is also not for long. And all this despite the fact that at the moment there are literally high-quality images for several cities.
And we do not stop. Thanks to friends from Russia, we have the opportunity to communicate with the Map Creator team and can make suggestions about introducing new functionality or changing the current one. And quite recently, literally in a few hours, having pounced on a mob, we translated street names into Belarusian. As a result, the names will exist in the Belarusian and Russian languages, as well as appear in the transliterated form for residents of other countries.
My story is that even a small group of people can do quite a lot of useful things for others, while expanding a large international corporation, drawing attention to themselves. Even our spontaneously formed community has become a real force. We achieved what we wanted, and even slightly more in some moments.
The question remains, what will happen next. We do not want to stop - we will continue. We will be happy to anyone who wants to help us.
Minsk Before and After
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/182990/
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