Updating admin levels 6, 8, 10 (for UNICEF social good project)

Hello,
I am part of UNICEF’s global innovation team (throughout the world we are exploring how to use technologies to improve the lives of children & young people, looking at everything from basic mobile phones to drones: http://www.unicefstories.org/2016/03/14/malawi-tests-first-unmanned-aerial-vehicle-flights-for-hiv-early-infant-diagnosis/)) I am new to Malaysia but have had success working with OSM communities in other countries on these kind of projects in the past.

We are in the early stages of deploying one of our most exciting platforms here in Malaysia: U-Report is a real-time communication platform that enables youth to share their ideas & opinions for free via SMS, Twitter or an APP to create real-time visualizations that are shared with the public, media, government - allowing youth to influence social issues that matter to them. Currently more than 2 million youth in 20 countries are using the platform to speak about things like education, violence, employment etc & we are looking forward to kicking it off soon here. We’d also be looking to deploy the same open-source software to help with disaster relief in flood-prone areas in East Malaysia.

To do this well, we’d need to have an OSM map with levels 6,8 and 10 updated. Can anyone help with this (or direct me to someone who can)? I’d really appreciate it!

For more info on how the project works elsewhere, see U-Report Nigeria: https://nigeria.ureport.in/
And on the open-source software, RapidPro: https://community.rapidpro.io/

Cheers!

Hello. Thanks for stopping by at this forum. A bit off-topic, but here’s hoping that this initiative led by UNICEF would achieve a great success!

To be honest, the Malaysian OSM community would love to get that in the map database as well. However, there are no open and compatible dataset related to the Malaysian admin boundaries. On top of that, so far, Malaysian active mappers are quite a tiny number; without a proper entity i.e. an OSM-related Malaysian NGO. Therefore, I assume, obtaining official geodata from the government can be a challenge in itself.

In short, The Department of Survey and Mapping Malaysia (JUPEM) is the right place to request these official boundary data. But I am not that sure about all the related costs.

Here’s an idea: getting UNICEF involved to obtain these boundary geodata. That sounds possible (at least to me) and may work out.

You may probably wait for the others to speak their mind.

This probably came late, but maybe useful for the others in the future.

Mapbox apparently offered (paid) administrative and postal code boundary dataset. The administrative dataset have details, up to the district level. Read more about their service - the Medium blogging platform filtering is still in force.

Can we use this to update OpenStreetMap? Unfortunately, no.