Planning your Projects on CoMapeo
What are key materials for a mapping project?
Key materials are any documents or data that help with planning and coordination.
- Maps with relevant information for the region
- Community life plans and community charters (“Planes de vida”)
- Legal documents or case files relating the focus of the mapping work
- Contact list of potential collaborators who can support any part of the work involved
- Equipment acquisition and budgeting
- Protocols for the Mapping team
Why is planning important?
Planning is a key step in the process of a mapping project. Gathering the necessary information and materials that will aid in the mapping project is one aspect. A key aspect is to understanding the actual community need for mapping. This will help with decisions about what data needs to be mapped through the use of CoMapeo.
Taking the time to do this planning will help the mapping team to only gather the type data that is useful for the goals of the project, and may offer hints into how to customize CoMapeo to facilitate said goals.
Understanding how CoMapeo functions will help any adaptations needed for your team.
👉🏽 Go to 🔗 Understanding Projects to learn more
Tips on Organizing the Team
Start by deciding who will be part of your team and what roles each person will play.
Choose who will collect observations, who will coordinate the team, and who will share results with the wider group, community and alllies.
Agree on simple protocols before you start: how to collect observations and tracks, how often to exchange with teammates, and how to keep sensitive information safe.
Go to 🔗 Managing a team to learn about making a project collaborative with CoMapeo
Deciding to Customize CoMapeo
CoMapeo can be used right away, without any customization, to collect observations using an Included Category Set**.**
The customization of CoMapeo is one of the most attractive features for community mapping purposes. Often matter is less a question of if customization is needed, but rather when it is possible.
💡 Tip: Make sure to get a bit of practical experience with CoMapeo Mobile to help inform decisions about the design of customized maps and categories set. Be sure to get input from people collecting data, responsible for the team, doing data analysis, and receiving the data for specific legal needs.
Go to 🔗 Initial Use of CoMapeo → Included Categories Set
Benefits to Customizing CoMapeo
CoMapeo can respond to the local needs and desires of specific projects and communities by incorporating Custom Categories Sets. Information needed can be organized into Categories that become the primary way to distinguish observation and track data collected. The way the categories are labeled and organized will inform and limit how data is analyzed and used later. In additional Details can be collected in an easy to use form format that help speed up gathering detailed and useful information in the field that is specific to individual respective categories. Details enrich the quality of CoMapeo data to be most useful for the goals of a project by an individual, a team, a community or an organization
💡 Tip: Learn from other communities through case studies and interviews about lessons from the process of customizing Categories sets
Go to 🔗 Mapping Waorani Ancestral Lands in EcuadorGo to 🔗 ECA Amarakaeri: Monitoring the Amarakaeri Communal Reserve in Peru
Benefits to Customizing a background map
Background maps have a set of advantages over the default background map that CoMapeo offers.
For starters, the default background map needs an internet connection to download all the necessary information to render it. So in areas with limited connectivity, the resulting map can have little to no detail. In contrast, custom background maps are loaded into CoMapeo and saved so that they can be accessed without internet connection.
Another key advantage is that custom background maps can have additional information that is not available through the original map sources: communal roads, recent land delimitation, local points of references, etc. This information can be key to navigating the land
🚧 Work in progress - More content will be added soon
Related Content
Go to 🔗 Building a Custom Categories Set