Drawing turf

Turf is drawn on a map of the real streets, with a finger or a mouse, on a computer, on a phone's browser, in the Field OP app, and in the app at /m/. The shape you draw is counted as you draw it — stops, eligible households and a time estimate — and cutting it fills the walk order in the same act. This page is how the drawing works, wherever you do it.

Where to start

In the console: Field, open the campaign, then Cut turf under the Ground map.
In the app (iPhone, Android, or the browser app at /m/): Your team — on My missions, or under More — then The campaign map, then Cut turf.

Cut turf is offered to the people who may start something new in a campaign. A captain may change the canvass they lead but may not cut new ground, so a captain is not shown the button.

Drawing the shape

Tap the map (or click it) to put down a corner. Keep tapping around the edge of the ground.
Tap the first corner again to close the shape. Close the shape under the map does the same.
Drag a corner to move it. A corner counts as touched anywhere within a fingertip of it, so you do not have to find its exact centre; when two corners are close together, the nearer one moves.
Tap a corner to select it — it fills in — and Delete this corner takes it out.
Undo takes back the last thing you did, whatever it was: a corner, a move, a close, a delete.
Start again clears the shape. That too can be undone.
Two fingers pinch to zoom, as on any map; they never put a corner down. Double-tapping does not zoom while you are drawing, because a double tap is two corners.

With a keyboard on the console's map, Backspace undoes, Delete removes the selected corner and Escape lets it go. Every one of these is also a button, so nothing is reachable only by a gesture.

A shape whose edges cross is not one piece of ground. The screen says so in words and will not count or cut it until you move the corner that crosses, and it will not close a shape that would cross. Corners all on one line enclose no ground and are refused the same way.

The count, and the cut

Once the shape is closed and has stopped moving for a moment, the doors inside it are counted with the same query the cut uses. Until the count has caught up with the shape, the screen says it is counting rather than showing a stale number as if it were current.

Cut the turf records it. What comes back is said plainly, and two things are warnings rather than refusals: the shape covers no doors (the ground has no addresses this organization holds, or they have never been placed on the map), and another turf already covers some of this ground (sometimes deliberate — two teams on one building — and otherwise doors knocked twice).

Describing the ground instead

If a map is the wrong tool for the moment, choose a bounding box (four numbers: west, south, east, north) or paste GeoJSON exported from another mapping tool. Both make the same polygon and cut the same turf as drawing does.

After the cut

A turf's own screen — in the console or the app — shows its shape with the stops numbered in walk order, what it holds, and the walk. A manager may move a stop: drag it by its handle in the app, or use Earlier and Later; in the console, the arrows. A stop you moved is held in place when the walk is next ordered. Mark it ready, Rename, and for a walked turf Open it again, which asks why — at least ten characters, kept beside the canvass numbers. Prepare the map cuts the offline map volunteers download; the screen says when it is ready. Print or save or share the walk sheet; it carries residents' names, and the register records you as holding a copy.

A door the map cannot show because its address was never placed can be put on the map by hand: Place stop … on the map, tap where the door is, and save. The geocoder leaves a door a person placed alone from then on.

What the map never shows

No map in Field OP shows a person's name. A turf has the name a manager gave it and a status; a stop is a building or an address and a count of dwellings. The search box finds addresses, never people. The map you draw on is read from Field OP's own copy of OpenStreetMap, so no outside map service learns where the campaign is working, and in a browser nothing of it is kept after the page closes.

Next: Field — the rest of a campaign's ground and days · The phone — the volunteer's side of the same walk