This week, the 2017 Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) Summit, co-hosted by Statistics Canada in Ottawa, comes at an incredibly timely moment. We gather to take stock of the contributions of the HOT community, look to the future, and strengthen partnerships across the open mapping community.
Maps help residents and relief workers navigate the path to recovery after a disaster and anticipate future needs. In just the last two weeks, the need for up-to-date maps after a disaster has never been more apparent. After Hurricane Harvey, Irma, the Bangladesh floods, and the earthquake in Mexico, HOT and other collaborative spaces have been working together to provide critical data and maps for first responders and affected populations. They are creating real-time updates on what has changed on the ground. This includes U-flood tracking inundated roads in Houston, and Catholic Charities USA using their map to identify especially vulnerable populations. Our team also dove in and built a map pin pointing hazards in hurricane affected areas (twice) — chemical plants, refineries, landfills, and other locations that pose an environmental risk in flood conditions.
What are the next complex global challenges for the open mapping community? HOT is already engaging with social crises beyond disaster response, such as training refugees to contribute to maps. This is a way for refugees to connect to their new communities and support their communities back home. HOT and other open communities can help people caught in conflict and poverty, locally and globally. Ottawa is a perfect setting for this year’s Summit, given the leadership of the Canadian government’s humane and progressive response to refugee crises, and efforts by Statistics Canada to build a national, crowd-sourced buildings inventory in OSM.
We remain committed to HOT and the amazing collaborations that grow from it — from companies like DigitalGlobe sharing open imagery for disaster mapping, to government agencies like NOAA publishing detailed imagery, to MSF and the Red Cross enabling humanitarian mapping everywhere with MapSwipe. For Mapbox, partnering with open mapping communities let us quickly plug in, sync with first responders and volunteers, and focus on the concrete ways that we can effectively contribute, such as technical support to builders and subsidized accounts for humanitarian organizations.
Let’s talk and figure out what’s next at the HOT Summit! Don’t miss Mikel’s presentation on ‘How a Company Collaborates with HOT’ on Thursday at 11:45am EST.
Open mapping for disasters and development was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.