Its nearly a year since I started working with Fingal County Council on the #MapLesotho project and in that time a number of great milestones and activities have been completed so of which are:

Last July a huge mapathon with users from around the world added over half a million nodes of data for Lesotho

In Sept we had a mapping party in the Lesotho Embassy in Dublin with the Irish OSM community

A dedicated website has been setup - http://maplesotho.wordpress.com/

A series of classes where held with school children in Dublin teaching them to map and getting them involved in #MapLesotho

A number of Irish OSM members / Fingal County Council staff are heading to Lesotho for 2 weeks from Feb 06th to 20th to work on the following:

Get the local mappers (there are quite a few now) more involved, editing more frequently and start discussions about them forming a Lesotho OSM group with semi-regular meetups Train govt. planners (most are mappers) on the use of JOSM and OSM data with QGIS Conduct a number of mapping sessions at the national university Meet with govt. data owners to talk about release of (i) data to OSM for imports and (ii) permission to scan, recitfy and derive info from existing maps

We’ve still got 2 tasks running in the HOT tasking manager since last July’s mapathon which we’ve been silently tipping along on.

Urban Task (mostly buildings) - 52% complete - http://tasks.hotosm.org/project/597 (please focus on Maseru if choosing this one)

Rural Task (mostly rivers, streams, roads) - 90% complete - http://tasks.hotosm.org/project/599

With all of this in mind, a number of the folks in Lesotho have set next Friday Jan 16th as a date for the next #MapLesotho mapathon. A large group are coming together in Dublin in the Fingal Council offices to carry out a supporting mapathon.

We are looking for other groups around the world to again join in with us in our mapathons.