Humanitarian Mapping as a Contribution to Achieving Sustainable Development Goals: Research into the Motivation of Volunteers and the Ideal Setting of Mapathons

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Thank you for your effort on addressing mapathons, humanitarian mapping, citizen science and SDGs. There is a need to address these conceptually much more in depth - each of them, and also using the most recent important references. The data is very small, so there is not much to improve with that but perhaps you can contextualize it better and how representative it is and in which aspects it is representative, or what you can say about the sampling method. The title promises a lot on SDGs but there is very little evidence on that. Think what is your key contribution to the studies of VGI, mapathons, humanitarian mapping analysis, citizen science, and how this article pushes these research frontiers forward - and show that clearly in your manuscript. 

This is a description of organized mapathons in one country having as main material 44 survey respondents of whom more than a third consider themselves inexperienced participants. Various simple statistical methods are used. However, the sample is very small and there is no discussion on representativeness to any kind.

Conceptual part is weak, partly shortly describing several authors' articles (putting 3-4 lines of text from each) and substantially omitting deeper discussion about citizen science, mapathons, VGI, etc. Furthermore, the newest key articles about OpenStreetMap mapathons in SDG are not use (not even those appeared in Nature, for example). The title promises discussion on SDGs but in the end that does not appear. 

 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

An interesting topic nicely treated and presented in the paper. The main idea and the structure of the study are very clear. The only doubt I have is the sampling size of 44 participants. The presented statistics and particular and overall conclusions made based on 44 participants may be questioned by the readers and scientific society. I would however accept this sampling size and all the findings of the paper. The authors have to decide on the style of the Figures. Boxplot-related figures are presented in color whereas all other figures are black and white. The style of figures should be uniform. In addition, phrasing should be better in two aspects, a scientific one and an English one.

Generally speaking, the paper is accepted in the present form with a few above-mentioned minor revisions. 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Thank you for your revisions, now the OSM and related issues are put into larger empirical context. The manuscript would still be substantially improved if there would be stronger conceptual discussion about the (dis)connections and engagements between humanitarian mapping, OSM, SDGs and citizen science. Now these are just listed in the article and there is no in-depth conceptualizations of them and about the evident challenges of engaging many kinds of people into OSM and mapathons, i.e. who can take part and who cannot take part of mapathons, and whether OSM can truly be part of an engaging citizen science and what OSM includes or excludes regarding SDGs.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.