Community Mapping Uganda

Just because it’s the been summer holidays and most students disappear home or off on their travels doesn’t mean the #Huckathon team slowed down. This summer saw the first series of #Huckathons at Station Hop, a craft beer tap house in Levenshulme (@stationhoplvm). Instead of doing a large scale one off event as has been done previously, a different approach was taken and fortnightly, small scale mapathons took place across July and August. Although the turnout was smaller (usually between 6-14 people), those who came stayed and mapped for the whole 2 hours of the event (and then some), resulting in thousands of features being added to the map - amazing!

Following the success of last year the #Huckathon team were invited back, to a bigger and better tent for BlueDot Festival at Jodrell Bank this summer. There were two big differences between BlueDot 2018 and BlueDot 2019. First, it was unbelievably wet this year in comparison to the sweltering year before – I mean being from Manchester we are used to the rain but my goodness did it pour! Second, this year we weren’t on the Wi-Fi. We could have been, but we didn’t need it…

Kate Booth, one of our talented volunteers from the Bluedot Festival #Huckathon has produced this fantastic video documenting her experience over the weekend:

Bluedot Festival is an award-winning weekend of discovery at the grounds of the Jodrell Bank deep space observatory. Set against a backdrop of the iconic Lovell Telescope, bluedot combines a music with a ground-breaking programme of live science experiments, expert talks and immersive artworks. Following winning our Award for Outstanding Contribution to Social Innovation at the University of Manchester Social Responsibility Awards, the organisers of Bluedot festival invited us to come along to do some mapping!

Working in un-mapped parts of the world is a tremendous challenge, but as luck would have it, Uganda has been mapped before… by the British Army in the 1960’s! Even more lucky is that there is a copy of the entire series of maps in the University of Manchester map library…

The #Huckathon team attended the University of Manchester Making a Difference Awards 2018 on Tuesday May 1^st, and was lucky enough to win the Award for Outstanding Contribution to Social Innovation, for our first mapathon.

The 30th of November 2017 saw the first ever #Huckathon, which happened even before we had come up with the name! The UoM Mapathon was hosted by the Geography Department at the University of Manchester, and was our first attempt at running such an event. A mapathon is an event where volunteers gather together and create maps of areas that have not previously been mapped, normally for the purposes of humanitarian work.