Maxar Technologies Inc.

04/12/2021 | News release | Distributed by Public on 04/12/2021 09:22

NOME Engagement Grows Significantly in Telework Posture

Last month marked one year since much of the country issued 'stay-at-home' orders to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 and non-essential office personnel across industries transitioned to remote work environments. This was also true for many employees of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and other U.S. government organizations who often review classified material and typically aren't permitted to telework.

Maxar and NGA work together in support of the National System for Geospatial Intelligence Open Mapping Enclave (NOME), an online capability that emerged throughout the past year as an essential element in the agency's pivot to a distributed workforce. The web-based platform enables a community of vetted users to create and update geospatial features in a crowdsourced 'living map.'

Prior to the COVID-19 crisis, NOME was primarily used for foundation feature collection. Since March 16, 2020, more users adopted the platform for mission support, including the creation of features for further dissemination across multiple networks and in the domain of AI/ML model training.

'With NOME, analysts can perform unclassified mission support remotely,' said Josh Sisskind, Maxar's NOME Program Manager. 'Using the collaborative tools within NOME, they remain connected to their team.'

The NOME user base saw unprecedented growth in the spring and summer of 2020, adding more users each month than the platform would usually add in a year. More importantly, engagement with the platform has persisted. Since March 2020, the crowd has made nearly 21 million edits, resulting in an average of 135,000 new geospatial features each week. These features are critical components of foundation base layers, analytic tradecraft, and cartographic products consumed by the National System for Geospatial Intelligence (NSG) and the Allied System for Geospatial Intelligence (ASG) communities.