Wondering what happened to the results and the winners of India’s first ever Google India Mapathon 2013. As per the schedule Google India need to announce the results on 24th of July, 2013 but its seems you have to wait longer. Google has sent out an email to all Mapathon participants explaining the reason for not publishing the results of the competition, which is mainly due to ‘No Response‘ from Government agencies.
The competition got into trouble when Google faced critical scrutiny from India’s biggest opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on violating Indian defence regulations on mapping. In wake of this Survey Of India (SOI) a government body responsible for carrying out surveying and mapping in the country expressed security concerns over the data being added during the Mapathon contest and demanded to review the data to make sure that it is safe to publish without revealing information that it considers sensitive. Google obliged to the demand and provided all the data to SOI, but till now SOI has not get back to Google with their findings and there absolutely no response from the Government agency.
Google says it can only publish the result of Mapathon competition once SOI gets back to them, which is causing this whole delay.
“As you may know, towards the end of the Mapathon, the Survey Of India (SOI) had expressed concerns over the data added during the contest. Specifically, the SOI wanted to review the data that was added during the Mapathon to make sure that it is safe to publish without revealing information that it considers sensitive. Towards this end, we had provided them the data that was added during the Mapathon, but have not yet heard back.
Since we can move forward only after receiving their approval, we are unfortunately not in a position to announce the results of the Mapathon yet, as originally planned. When we do hear back from the SOI, we will announce the results of the contest. We feel your disappointment. Indeed, we were hoping that we would be in a position to announce our winners today, which is the reason we did not pro-actively put out any notification about a potential delay. We will continue to persistently follow-up with SOI and hope to announce the results at the earliest.” says Mapathon 2013 Team on the official Mapathon website.
The Google India Mapathon 2013 mapping competition which started on February 12, 2013 and ended on March 25, 2013 with participants from all over India, who created better maps for India, by adding knowledge of their neighborhoods through Google Map Maker. With lot’s of prizes including Android tablets, smartphones, gift vouchers and Google merchandise to be won by top 1000 mappers.
The competition was a big success with thousands of active Indians participating and mapping their neighborhoods to Google Maps. Through this Google has gathered valuable information to improve the vast local area of India on Google Maps.
Google earlier also got into trouble when published high quality pictures of sensitive places such as Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Naval dockyards, nuclear and oil establishments and Rashtrapati Bhavan on its Google Earth. With Mapathon 2013 competition Google has violated certain rules that require to inform the people participating in the competition about mapping policy provisions.