Hi, I am completely new to OpenStreetMaps OpenStreetMap but as an academic spatial person I love the idea. I study malaria and one of the things we are interested in doing is mapping which households have malaria in a region. This requires data on the locations of all households in an area, which in most developing countries simply isn't known. I am trying to think creatively about how it might be possible to map the locations of households (and possibly define things like roof type), rivers and waterbodies without having to actually visit them all with a GPS. It strikes me that there is a lot of crossover with OpenStreetMaps, although unless I'm mistaken, I don't think it is currently possible to use satellite imagery like Google Earth for tracing/digitizing in OSM. I know a group who have farmed off 1km x 1km tiles of Google Earth imagery to users of Amazon Mechanical Turk who then mark the locations of households which is kind of what I was thinking, although I would like to do it for free. I'm also not sure a) whether this breaks Google's copyright laws b) whether there is a better way. I'd love to hear people's thoughts/ideas. This could make a huge difference to us and to many other partners who would like to know where people live in the deprived settings. Thanks a lot!

Hi, I am completely new to OpenStreetMaps but as an academic spatial person I love the idea. I study malaria and one of the things we are interested in doing is mapping which households have malaria in a region. This requires data on the locations of all households in an area, which in most developing countries simply isn't known. I am trying to think creatively about how it might be possible to map the locations of households (and possibly define things like roof type), rivers and waterbodies without having to actually visit them all with a GPS. It strikes me that there is a lot of crossover with OpenStreetMaps, although unless I'm mistaken, I don't think it is currently possible to use satellite imagery like Google Earth for tracing/digitizing in OSM. I know a group who have farmed off 1km x 1km tiles of Google Earth imagery to users of Amazon Mechanical Turk who then mark the locations of households which is kind of what I was thinking, although I would like to do it for free. I'm also not sure a) whether this breaks Google's copyright laws b) whether there is a better way. I'd love to hear people's thoughts/ideas. This could make a huge difference to us and to many other partners who would like to know where people live in the deprived settings. Thanks a lot!