Missing Maps: community powered resilience

15-17 May 09:00 - 18:00
Booth: 6, Expo Center Foyer (1st Floor)
View map
Organizer(s)
Humanitarian OpenStreet Map Team
Contact
Rebecca Firth (rebecca.firth@hotosm.org)
Participation:
Public
Primary floor language:
English
Interpretation:
No
Live Broadcast:
No
Accessible:
Yes
International Sign:
No
CART:
No
Remote Participation:
No

Disasters kill nearly 100,000 & affect 200 million people each year, but vulnerable places home to millions of people, are still literally 'missing' from any map, & responders lack the information to make time-critical, data-driven decisions.

Missing Maps is a cross-sector collaborative project to dramatically advance disaster relief & risk reduction by mapping these blank spots. Started by Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT), American and British Red Cross Society, & Médecins Sans Frontières UK, we have since expanded to 18 NGO partners, including Red Cross National Societies, IFRC, 510, & academia, e.g., Heidelberg University. Four of our members will be present at the Platform. Our initial goal was to map 20 million vulnerable people. Since 2015, we’ve mapped 80 million, & have expanded our vision to map the bottom billion.

OpenStreetMap (OSM) has 4.3 million registered users. Since 2010, HOT has worked to bridge the gap between citizen volunteers & government agencies. Organizing & leveraging these contributions, we have developed systematic tools & processes to enable crowdsourcing maps for humanitarian and development use. Since 2010, open mapping has filled geospatial data gaps in the world’s least mapped places. Data is created through open partnerships with government agencies & civil society groups. For instance, National Governments like Finland, Indonesia & the Philippines are now using OSM data as an official source for DRM.

We will discuss/demonstrate:

- Open mapping using OSM: How government & civil society can leverage citizen contributions in a large-scale, systematic way to strengthen the resilience of communities at risk, linking ‘formal’ data users with ‘informal’ data producers.

- How enhanced OSM maps of large scale at risk areas, that provide exposure & vulnerability data at local level will increase the effectiveness of early warning & action.

- The importance of open data to reduce workload for many humanitarian & development actors & how to link worldwide remote volunteers with community activities through mapping.

- Provide a better understanding of how community vulnerability & capacity maps can complement & be combined with traditional data sources for inclusion in official statistics.

- Explain the relevance of open geospatial data to build resilience through DRR across different sectors including health, livelihoods, etc.