The Man Who is “Painting His Country on a Canvas”

Jabran Rafique: The main reason was the enormous use of Google Maps in the daily life of people in UK and how these maps were extremely helpful in various situations. I wished to have a similar facility available for my home country, as it would be so helpful to people who always have struggled for things like finding a particular place while visiting a new town. So once Google launched Map Maker in 2008, it was indeed a moment of complete joy for me! Since the launch of Google Maps for UK in 2005/2006, I had been exploring various similar activities through other portals i.e. Wikimapia, Open Street Map and Google Maps’ section of “My Maps”. I chose Google for few particular reasons: Google was already a famous website, and Google Maps were also available through its API for extended use on developers side.

Elan: How did you balance your time at university with mapping?

JR: I was in the Web Development masters program at Staffordshire University while keeping up with my hobby. Mapping was like a passion. This meant giving couple of hours to it on an average day and then spending nearly all weekend on it.

Elan: Approximately how many points have you added so far? Is Pakistan the only country you wish to map?

JR: Yes, my main focus remains on Pakistan.  Since the whole idea of doing this was to provide a facility to people who can make a good use of it, and I believe Pakistanis have a great need for this. I have been mapping in other countries that I’ve visited in past i.e. UAE, Kenya etc. but the number of edits in these countries can be counted on fingers. The complete stats of my mapping activity can be found from my Map Maker profile.  To date, with 1904 days on Map Maker, I have mapped 6645.8 km long roads, 143 points of interest, 1217 business listings, 46420 square km area and have edited 6390 features. There have been 66881 edits from me and I have reviewed 5873 edits of other mappers.

Elan: Tell me a bit about the team you have formed.

JR: Basically, there were also few more dedicated volunteers who were working on the Pakistan map. Soon, we met one another through discussion forums in Map Maker. Collectively, we decided to form a team and follow certain self-made rules to maintain a high quality of map data. We all agreed that if we are spending time in order to help people, then we must do it well. To practice this ideology, we set up these mutual set of rules to draw features, edit and review them. For such reasons, we used Map Maker discussion forums, social media, and occasionally hosted online meetings. There is no fixed number for people in this team as anyone can join in by following the best practices and automatically becomes the part of the team and similarly no one is the leader in there. However, some of the mappers have higher designations based on their experience and their accepted work. Few of these designations are Google Map Maker Advocates, Regional Expert Reviewers and Supper Mappers. The profile page for each mapper has the badges repressing their acquired designation(s).

Elan: Has the team at Google noticed your efforts?

JR: Yes, Google noticed the amount of hard work we put in at the very early stages of our project. They contacted us, featured our work in their blogs and news, and even let us speak at the conferences of new launches of the Map Maker around the world.  There are some relevant links at http://jabran.me/about/

Elan: What do you hope to gain from this project?

JR: I am really excited about getting more and more map data on this platform, since it has already proven to be useful during a time of large scale crisis. The only thing I wish to gain from this project is helping people be more productive.