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New week, some of MapOSMatic contributors and developers will join Rennes for a one week MapOSMatic hackfest. We hope to fix the numerous bugs and feature requests we have! Stay tuned! ;-)

It is January 12th, 2012, 2 years after the quake, that I started my eighth trip to Haiti where HOT will partner with the Communauté OpenStreetMap Haiti (COSMHA). The project, STM0120, funded by USAID/OTI/HRI. This project aims at building a team of 30 youths from the communes of Saint Marc, Arcahaie and Cabaret as well as mapping the Saint Marc Development Corridor (SMDC) formed by those three communes in the course of the next three months.

The 12th of January is not an ordinary day in Haiti. One thinks about the dead, the injured, the damages, and those who survive, those who continue to live with this recent part of Haiti’s history. One is also forced to contemplate the tremendous effort of global and local unity at work in the immediate aftermath of the quake and after. Lastly, one looks ahead towards the reconstruction of Haiti to pursue and strengthen this solidarity.

The OSM project is one of the examples of this global solidarity at play after the quake in Haiti and now grounded in Haiti. The OSM response has been been timely, massive, relevant and continued. Today it results in a referenced base map which has been widely used by the broad humanitarian system, the government of Haiti and groups of the Civil Society during emergency response to the current early recovery phase. The map has been maintained mostly in Port-au-Prince metropolitan area, but also in Leogane, Jacmel and Gonaives by humanitarian groups, Haitian mappers from COSMHA, as well as international mappers active in Haiti. Paid projects such as humanitarian and baseline data surveys led by the International Organization of Migration ((IOM), the Cooperazione Internazionale (COOPI) and Architecture for Humanity (AFH), working in partnership with Haitians from COSMHA and benefiting from various forms of support by HOT, generate incomes which in return allow for some the Haitian mappers to engage voluntarily in community-driven and self managed mapping projects such as Soley Leve and Tap Tap Map). Trainings form the second pillar of the OSM activity in country and have been largely happening from within IOM and UN facilities benefiting all player in the humanitarian system, the Government of Haiti and groups from Civil Society. Aside from those typical humanitarian facilities, the Resource Center of Haiti Communitere (HC) has gained a central position over the last year, offering COSMHA a lab from where meeting, training, designing, planning and implementing projects is possible. Through the facilitation of Jaakko Helleranta, the Ecole Supérieure d’infotronique d’Haïti (ESIH) has developed over the last months as another lab from which further OSM work can develop. Attention to shaping the future of OSM in Haiti guides HOT, COSMHA and internationals into discussing and designing projects around OSM training and data collection to make the system sustainable and grow the community.

The STM020 mapping project that HOT and COSMHA are about to start in Saint Marc results from a long project design phase that started last August between the two organizations and USAID/OTI/HRI. We’d like to thank the initial facilitation role played by Pascale Verly and Leonard Doyle with whom COSMHA and HOT has been working with IOM since a year ago. In the context of the second anniversary of 12-Jan , it’s rewarding for HOT to work on this project as a contractor of COSMHA which is the grantee of this project.

Both structures find in USAID/OTI/HRI a sound partner, understanding of OSM and willing through this project to assess the potential of its approach around building capacities through our Train The Trainer (TTT) scheme and baseline surveys and mapping in the context of local economic development.

A HOT/COSMHA team of ten supported in the initial three weeks by 3 trainers will be based in Saint Marc in a hub of their own both a workplace and a lodging center equipped with adequate hardware and furnished with the right logistics assets to train 30 Youths from the Saint Marc Development Corridor (SMDC) in the art of mapping ala OSM and altogether improve upon the base map of these three communes.

The project will be carried out in close cooperation with SDC communities to ensure relevance of the OSM map in the Corridor. This has been facilitated first hand through the initial ground work laid out by COSMHA, the territorial ties that Levekanpe, the local contractor of USAID/OTI/HRI, has developed in the area, and the 30 Youths representing the various communities from three section communales. Consultation, outreach, awareness, and map releases will be organized. HOT and COSMHA will also be attentively engaged with Local and National Authorities through similar outreach activitties and through ad hoc training based on available resources.

COSMHA and HOT seek to make of Saint Marc a hub for the development of OSM in Haiti and will use the community gained over the last two years within the Haitian GIS world to connect the Saint Marc Youths to the various uses of OSM that have been happening in Haiti, presenting lectures or hands-on sessions on topics such as Geography, crisis mapping, GIS applied to humanitarian, urban planning. This will be done with the view of replicating some successes in Saint Marc after the three months project. Asides from the Youths, what HOT is looking at is to grow the ability of COSMHA to manage such projects and be able to replicate it in a phase 2.0 with USAID/OTI/HRI. The project will also be a working ground for HOT with the hosting of volunteers and interns, who can be acquainted with field work and help the team to meet the challenge.

HOT also has a role to play in this mapping project from afar and after the initial set up the team will respond with ideas of engagement for those who are willing to step in.

Finally, to ensure the widest usability of the map of Saint Marc as well as enhancing the HOT toolsets, data download and web-visualization services will be built. Data download services will be developed to facilitate the generation of OSM extracts (osm, Spatialite and shapefile) based upon preset files. This will foster access to customized data extracts and facilitate the process for COSMHA to make the data resulting from its surveys and mapping accessible to all.

Plane landed a couple of hours ago in Ayiti, more soon.

Nicolas.

GIS Corps is joining together with HOT again for a join project.  The first collaboration between HOT and GIS Corps occurred during the Samoa exercise that happened earlier this year.  Once again we are joining forces to work mapping Padang City in Indonesia.  GIS Corps is a volunteer organization that provides GIS Professionals as volunteers.  They’ve been in existence since 2003 and have had about 2500 volunteers from 93 countries.  We are are excited that 11 of their members are going to join us to help complete the Help Map for a Safer Padang Task (requires OpenStreetMap login).  You can read a little bit more about those joining us, such as the countries they hail from on the GIS Corps website.

The goal of the effort is to map all the streets and buildings in Padang so that it can feed into risk models.  The Australia-Indonesia Facility for Disaster Reduction (AIFDR) can then use this information as the exposure component for risk modeling.  Others can potentially also additionally build on the data easily using Walking Papers in the future as well.

We look forward to moving forward on this.  Thanks for the help GIS Corps!

Nestoria have given a very generous donation to the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team In a blog post CEO Ed Freyfogle explains: “…rather than sending our clients and partners Christmas gifts, we’ve instead donated on their behalf to a project we believe has the potential to improve the lives of millions: the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT).” What [...]

Nestoria have given a very generous donation to the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team

In a blog post CEO Ed Freyfogle explains:
“…rather than sending our clients and partners Christmas gifts, we’ve instead donated on their behalf to a project we believe has the potential to improve the lives of millions: the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT).”

What a great idea! The total amount was $2000 US. Huge thanks to nestoria, and to all of nestoria’s clients, for this Christmas gift. Nestoria, the property search engine, have been long-time supporters of OpenStreetMap, sponsoring the conferences and (as of recently) using OSM maps on all their sites.

We have fund-raising on our minds as we go into 2012. Significant sums of money often come in the form of funded projects, which present us with wonderful opportunities to get OpenStreetMap out there, but we also hope to raise more funds as with this donation, which give HOT some spending power in its own right, helping us to establish ourselves as an independent entity and allowing us to pursue our own goals more directly, perhaps even to fund our own deployments. Some announcements and more details of spending plans coming soon.

We’d like to welcome two new members to the board of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team: Schuyler Erle – Long time pioneer of open Source geo-hacking, co-founder of the OSGeo Foundation and co-author of “Mapping Hacks”. Of course he is also a long time OpenStreetMapper and was an early proponent of OpenStreetMap for disaster response. John [...]

We’d like to welcome two new members to the board of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team:

Schuyler Erle – Long time pioneer of open Source geo-hacking, co-founder of the OSGeo Foundation and co-author of “Mapping Hacks”. Of course he is also a long time OpenStreetMapper and was an early proponent of OpenStreetMap for disaster response. John Crowley – Instrumental in helping with the release of imagery for use in OpenStreetMap, requiring patience and strategy in interfacing between big government and more informal organizations. With his connections John will be able to help shape the HOT for funding and future collaborations.

Schuyler Erle and John Crowley contributed massively to the process of enabling and encouraging OpenStreetMap use in disaster response after the Haiti earthquake. See them together (along with Jeffrey Johnson) in this inspiring Where 2.0 presentation in 2010 (14 min video) as they look back at how OSM helped in Haiti.

The new board were elected (as announced on the HOT mailing list) along with accepting nominations for new HOT members, on Wed 14th December. Thankyou to all those who took part!

Photo of Schuyler Erle is CC-BY-SA-2 Chris Fleming

The World Health Organization (WHO) has asked HOT and the Stand By Task Force (SBTF) to activate to map health facilities in in Libya. This is not an emergency activation, but still very important. The basic point is to get a final Health Facility Registry GIS layer for Libya, with the location type, status and [...]

The World Health Organization (WHO) has asked HOT and the Stand By Task Force (SBTF) to activate to map health facilities in in Libya.

This is not an emergency activation, but still very important. The basic point is to get a final Health Facility Registry GIS layer for Libya, with the location type, status and name of health centers across the country. This helps WHO as the starting point for return and increase of crucial health services in Libya; geographic information is crucial for the Libyan health system to manage its services for benefit of all citizens.

Volunteers are asked to collect all available information on the net that can be used to create the registry. This Activation will end on January 15. Much of the work will take place in a shared Google Doc to start, with import into OSM after completion. This makes it easier to coordite with SBTF volunteers.

STEPS:

1) Email myself (mikel_maron yahoo com) and request to join the activation. Include your Skype id, if you’d like to join the public Skype chat. I’ll respond with links to the spreadsheets we’re using.

2) Fill out a GForm with your information. You need to fill this form only the first time you start working, you do not need to do this every time.

3) Go to the GSpreadsheet and start looking for Health Facilities in Libya. You DO NOT need to fill in all the information if you do not find them: try to add as many info as you can find but do not get crazy if you cannot find one of the requested info. Other volunteers will look for it. The information already contained in the spreadsheet needs to be completed and checked.

Under the License/Origin column, you will see different data sets with different licenses for any individual point. Some are ok to use with OSM (VRAM_WHO, ICRC), and some are clearly not (gmapmaker). OSM, of course, wants data thats free and open license wise. So as HOT, we can also contribute by finding an open source for places already mapped in un-free sources.

Otherwise, the task should be clear? We can discuss on the HOT list here, but please do not share the spreadsheets publicly for now.

We almost forgot to report on our earthquake response in Turkey from this October.  Fortunately Suha Ulgen recently did an interview that reminded me that we really should highlight the coordination that occurred after this event. Soon after the earthquake near Van, Turkey in October OpenStreetMap volunteers began mapping. Without new satellite imagery available this task was [...]

We almost forgot to report on our earthquake response in Turkey from this October.  Fortunately Suha Ulgen recently did an interview that reminded me that we really should highlight the coordination that occurred after this event.

Soon after the earthquake near Van, Turkey in October OpenStreetMap volunteers began mapping. Without new satellite imagery available this task was not going to be very effective.  Fortunately Suha Ulgen contacted put me in touch with Sean Lowery from DigitalGlobe.  There was a lot of imagery available for the area effected by the earthquake, just OpenStreetMap did not have access to it.  That is where DigitalGlobe’s FirstLook service came in.

In support of the Turkish Earthquake response, DigitalGlobe donated access to its FirstLook product soon after the event.  The FirstLook service, was served online to OpenStreetMap editors through a WMS service.  DigitalGlobe describes the service as “The FirstLook product leverages DigitalGlobe’s constellation of three very high resolution satellites to minimize any wait time for post event data.  FirstLook has delivered coverage of over 70 events of high public interest worldwide to date in 2011.”Allow those volunteering for the response to see highly accurate and detailed both pre and post event satellite imagery.  The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team created areas of interest utilizing the Tasking Manager to direct people to areas where imagery was available and digitizing concentration was needed.

This was not the first time that DigitalGlobe has donated access to the FirstLook service in response to an event.  The first was after the tsunami in the Sendai area of Japan earlier this year. Without access to high resolution imagery OpenStreetMap would not be able to assist in response to these events.  Thanks DigitalGlobe for providing it in response to the October earthquake in Turkey and thank you to Suha for putting us together for this response.

To see fully how much data was added checkout this visualization from ITOWorld, depicting edits over the past 90 days.

On 5th – 6th December 2011, HOT came to Bali for another training. Here we were working with Australian Community Development and Civil Society Strengthening Scheme (ACCESS) and their partners. The training was held in Puri Dalem Hotel, Sanur. This time we trained 17 people from 4 different areas. They are from Bali, Lombok, Sumba, [...]

On 5th – 6th December 2011, HOT came to Bali for another training. Here we were working with Australian Community Development and Civil Society Strengthening Scheme (ACCESS) and their partners. The training was held in Puri Dalem Hotel, Sanur. This time we trained 17 people from 4 different areas. They are from Bali, Lombok, Sumba, and Selayar Island. These people are facilitator and they wanted to map their areas based on their needs. So we taught them basic OpenStreetMap things such as how to collect data using GPS and Walking Papers, then how to edit data with JOSM, and upload it to OpenStreetMap. We also taught them step-by-step what they can do with the data that they already collected with GIS software Quantum GIS (QGIS).

All participant trying to learn how to use GPS

All training materials are collected from learnOSM.org with additional things that still are to be added on QGIS tutorial such as how to join spreadsheet file with the shapefile and using eVis plugin for adding pictures into attribute.

Based on our experience for training people around Indonesia, we expect that there will be some unexpected problem that would occur during the training. This time, we were struggling with windows virus when we tried to distribute all software and copies of training materials. We would recommend ourselves for next training to make another media for transferring all materials besides using USB sticks, either a CD or DVD.

Anyway, the training went pretty well, even we though our time was short because there were a lot of materials that we had to go over. Our QGIS tutorial experience was teaching in Sumba, in each district (Bima and Dompu) spending 2 days with 4-5 participants. But this time, we did one and a half day for OpenStreetMap basics and 4 hours for QGIS. We were glad that they feel these OpenStreetMap and QGIS are very useful and applicable for mapping their area based on their needs and interests.

People from Lombok are more interested to map social and economic map. The only problem that they have is accessibility to some villages because the roads are still bad and they do not have good satellite imagery in several areas. People from Sumba and Bali more or less will do the same thing with different number of villages that they would like to map. But, people from Sumba wanting us to comeback for attending their follow-up result in next year. They want to apply OpenStreetMap with QGIS for mapping then they will present the map result to their local governor.

Everyone is seriously paying attention for the training

There is one area that has problem, that area is Selayar Island, which has more than 10,000 km2 sizes. It does not have any point, line, and polygon on this island. Both Bing and Google do not have good satellite imagery. So, they are willing to propose a budget to their local governor to buy satellite imagery. We are really curious what would happen to this island after we gave them training. We hope that our efforts would keep their spirit to map the whole island.

Moreover, there is still a lot of work to support their mapping activities; we will keep in touch with them for technical issues and adding more guidelines in learnOSM.org.

Greetings from all participants in Bali! (Thanks to Martha for this photo!)

During HOT’s time working in Indonesia we’ve met with many different groups doing different types of mapping. One of the more common types is poverty mapping. This week we returned to Sumbawa for the third time to work with groups from Dompu and Bima. The first time we were on Sumbawa in June was to [...]

2 weeks ago Nicolas Chavent and I spent the week in Geneva. The initial impetus for the trip was the 3rd annual International Conference on Crisis Mapping (ICCM). Since there were many descending on Geneva for the event additional meetings were held. The two that we attended were the United Nations Office for Coordination of [...]

One month ago, I asked what to do with 10 million GPS points, and it turns out one awesome answer is map an entire country. I wanted to experiment with the new HOT Tasking Server, so I set up a task using the Swaziland GPS tiles, but I didn’t bother to promote the effort at [...]

We hope you guys still remember about our project in Indonesia. There was a mapping competition happen during the project and the winner was announced on the second week of August. There are five winners, they are: 1) Irwan Maryon (University of Andalas, Padang) 2) Dimas Raharjo (University of Indonesia, Jakarta) 3) Irwan Abdul Rohman (Institute [...]

update: please note that the URL of the imagery in the Padang task has changed to: http://aerial.openstreetmap.or.id/padang/ the previous URL is no longer in use A couple weeks ago Patrick Meier wrote about HOT’s new tool for tasking, the OpenStreetMap Tasking Manager.  Now it has finally moved to its permanent home: tasks.hotosm.org One of the [...]

Many members of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team have managed to come together in Denver for the State Of The Map. Things are always a bit hectic at this conference. We’ll have to try to report back more on some of the discussions we’ve had, when we all get chance to come up for air. Some [...]

HOT has activated to improve OSM, for the drought and famine crisis in East Africa. Read on for the background, the actions we’re taking, and how you can help. The unfolding of drought and famine emergencies is substantially different from sudden onset natural disasters like earthquakes, hurricanes, flooding, and volcanoes. The crisis is usually predictable [...]