Community engagement best practices?

Hello there! I just found Maphub yesterday and while I’m definitely still learning the ropes I’m really enjoying this service, so thank you for your work! :slight_smile:

I work at a regional planning agency, and a lot of our work involves community outreach and engagement. Given the current public health crisis, this work has quickly moved online. We’re planning an online event to track progress and get input on a transportation project. Normally, this would have involved folks drawing on printed maps, and I think Maphub fits this digital need really nicely.

Since the ability to invite other users as editors is still in the works, I’ve seen it suggested to create a team account with shared credentials so many people can contribute to the same map. Would it be possible for multiple people to log into the account at the same time, or would that throw an error/cause problems? Would they be able to see other users’ work in real time, or just their own?

I’ve thought about designating one user as a scribe and have them share their screen with another tool like Zoom or Slack, then take in verbal or written user input to draw on the map. If folks have other ideas or methods that have worked for them, though, I’d love to hear them.

Thanks again!

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Hi Annabelle! Fellow planner here doing similar research as you-- looking for collaborative mapping tools while we’re all working from home. I’m responding to your post in the hopes that I’ll get a notification when someone who knows the answer responds :slight_smile:

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Hello Annabelle and Carolyn! Yes, MapHub is commonly used for community mapping efforts, however as you have noted currently the only way to do this is via team accounts with shared passwords.

Since it is a Beta version, there is currently no limitations regarding this. The only problem is that if multiple people try to edit the map at the same time, one of their edits will be lost. To avoid this situation, make sure that only one person edits the map at a time and you reload the page frequently.

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Thank you, Zsolt! Definitely wouldn’t want to lose anyone’s contributions, so we’ll look into some ways to share one person’s edits. I think a screenshare would work well, but there may be other ways with tools I don’t even know of yet. If we do go with Maphub for this meeting, I’ll be sure to come back to this thread and let y’all know what we did and how it went :slight_smile:

Hi guys,
does it work differently if you’re editing different maps on one account at the same time
Like, every guest creates an own map and you merge them by hand later :slight_smile:

Greetings,
Michel

Hi Michel,

It’s a workaround, which might work depending on your usecase. Basically you’d need to export each map in a GeoJSON and then import them all to the same map.

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