History of the OSM Tasking Manager

The following is a brief history of the OSM Tasking Manager and tools/design ideas which inspired it.

WIP

• 2007: Search for Jim Grey gridded aerial imagery & used Amazon Mechanical Turk to do distributed search and rescue. Starting thoughts on micro-tasking imagery analysis for humanitarian response and HOT http://brainoff.com/weblog/2007/05/02/1247
• 2008-2009: Tools using grids to record how far areas were already mapped and if they still needed mapping were used to improve OSM mapping from aerial images for the district of Upper Palatinate, in Bavaria, Germany. See DE:Luftbilder aus Bayern/Pilotprojekt (in German).
• 2010 January: Early Haiti earthquake response mapping took place without coordination tools. New users had to seek out opportunities to add useful missing data, and edit conflicts were a problem. Basic guidance was added to the wiki describing worst hit locations, areas where most detail was needed, and advice on how to find where details may be missing. This exposes limitations, particularly a lack of clarity for new contributors looking for ways to help. Collective realization of need for a mapping collaboration tool.
• 2010 late January: A tool called osm-matrix is developed to overlay a grid and assess completion levels. Used in some follow-up mapping areas e.g Jacmel. mailing list reference.
• 2010 February: Mikel Maron & Nicolas Chavent synthesize community ideas, including bullet points on need for collaboration / tasking. Wrote up https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Humanitarian_OSM_Team/Haiti_Strategy_And_Proposal#Tools, https://hotosm.org/updates/2010-02-09_humanitarian_osm_team_haiti_strategy_and_proposal
• 2010 April: WhereCamp. Concept of "OSM Tasking Server" fleshed out in Camp Roberts planning session with many, facilitated by Schuyler Erle http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8RneT0e22OYJ:wiki.crisiscommons.eu/wiki/Camp_Roberts_Planning+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us Cached copy of Camp Roberts Planing 2010 Notes
• 2010 ~August: QualityStreetMap (v1) tool was lauunched by François Van Der Biest featuring a grid, and asking users to assess squares by "quality" measures.
• 2010 July: SotM Girona. Many HOT discussions among community, including Tasking Manager. Humanitarian OSM Team/Haiti at SOTM 2010. Also lightning talk by François Van Der Biest on QualityStreetMap.
• 2010 December: Random Hacks of Kindness. Further sketch of Tasking Manager requirements by Kate Chapman, Jeff Johnson and others.
• 2010 December: first commits to a v2 OSMQA by Eric Lemoine. This used the pylons framework and did Oauth with OSM.
• 2011 March: Formal requirements written up https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hRyfocP8SbasXEXpsRUCxsidItxd8uw87p9NnxA0Stk/edit
• 2011 mid-year: Funding for OSMTM secured by Kate Chapman as part of HOT Indonesia project and financially supported by Australia-Indonesia Facility for Disaster Reduction (AIFDR). Camptocamp hired to develop.
• 2011 September: OSMTM V1 launched blog post announcing tasking manager
• 2012-2014: Pierre Giraud voluntarily leads further development of OSMTM, including the start of more stable V2 https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/hot/2014-February/004452.html. Lots more detail on this story in http://pgiraud.github.io/hot_summit_2015/#/36
• 2014 April: A consortium of donors contribute to development of V2 https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/hot/2014-April/005167.html
• 2014 July: V2 released