Deploying Project Sidewalk to New Cities

[jonfroehlich]

From the beginning, Project Sidewalk's overarching vision has been to develop tools & techniques that semi-automatically map and assess all of the sidewalks in the world--using an intermixing of computer vision, machine learning, and crowdsourcing. As part of this vision, we are looking for new deployment cities outside of the US.

Based on our experiences deploying into three US cities, here are our primary considerations:

• Most importantly, the presence of strong local advocates such as citizens, non-profit organizations, or government officials who can help us recruit and sustain communities of volunteers to help. We want to partner with you to make this work.
• City size: smaller cities tend to have fewer resources and thus may benefit more from Project Sidewalk. If your city is large, we may want to do a slow-roll deployment where we start with a smaller subsection (e.g., 100-120 miles or 160-193 kilometers).
• Need. Are the sidewalks in your city currently in https://www.openstreetmap.org/? Does your city employ on-the-ground workers for physical accessibility inspection? What is the state of your pedestrian infrastructure?
• The presence of Google Street View (GSV). Project Sidewalk uses Google Street View for imagery. Thus, our techniques work best when a GSV car has recently driven through your city. If you're not sure about this, contact us and we can investigate for you!
• Ideally, financial support. This is a discussion we should have over email or Skype but ideally there would be some tangible resources (either via personnel time or money) that you could supply

Because deploying into a new city is not (yet) completely automated, we estimate that it takes @misaugstad (our lead dev and research scientist) about ~2-4 days per city to setup and configure the city.

For further background on the types of questions and discussions we have about deployment cities, see this thread inquiring about deployment to Los Alamos, NM (#1379) and Pittsburgh, PA (#1626).

[jonfroehlich]

This should be a wiki entry rather than an Issue. Moved it here: https://github.com/ProjectSidewalk/SidewalkWebpage/wiki/Considerations-when-Preparing-for-and-Deploying-to-New-Cities