Category: openstreetmap

Kate posted her wishlist for OpenStreetMap and I second everything she wrote … OSM can be fine tuned to be even easier. In my wishlist post, I want to cover improving connections between mappers, and focusing mappers attention.

In short, OSM should be more like Facebook. Seriously. A news feed should show you the most relevant activity and news for you personally, and the profile page should show what you’re about in OSM in a more approachable way.

The sociality of OSM is its biggest strength. The intricacies of maps, tags, places are discussed in minute detail, and are ultimately the result of conversation, not top down dictate. The result are maps that are more expressive for more situations than any other platform. And we even meet in person! At the pub, the hack weekend, the LogCluster meeting. Anyone who’s ever been to a State of the Map conference can attest, it’s a vibrant, fun, exciting movement.

OSM has hundreds of thousands of users, and hundreds of millions of map features. Yet the tools to connect to mappers and monitor an area are still the same as 5 years ago. Changing this is my wishlist … and yes, I know that most all of OSM features are coded voluntarily, and its something I could do myself rather than list out … I appreciate all the time and energy that goes into OSM coding, this is my *wish* list.

Finding the Local Community

If I’m travelling some place new for an event, I want to connect to the local OSM community, and the process is complicated and not obvious. First, browse to the area in OSM and click the “History” tab, which should show recent edits in the area. Problem is, this often includes large, global edits which overlap this local area and aren’t relevant. And if you page through in a somewhat mind-numbing fashion, the OSM rails app starts to have performance problems past page 5. OWL is potentially a solution to this, but it has already been a priority development item for years.

And what the history tab won’t do in either form is tell you who the most active, prominent mappers in the community are. For that, I usually jump over to ITO’s excellent OSM Mapper, which present and visualizes summary statistics for an arbitrary area. Excellent, but you have to know it’s there, and it takes a separate authentication, and is a little counter intuitive to use. But from there, I have a list of 5-10 top mappers, with links to the OSM profile pages, from which I can send them a message. And wait, and hope they respond.

Next, I’ll jump into the wiki, and look through the relevant Wiki Projects. Sometimes this will have listing of Users in an area, or links to their website, or mailing lists. The User profile pages sometimes have a way to contact that user, but just as often not. If there’s a mailing list, then it’s about subscribing to yet another mailing list, perhaps one in a foreign language, and posting. If there’s a project website, that’s usually golden and a sign of an active local community that will be responsive.

Focusing Attention

And that’s just for a one time connection. Most mappers have been involved in mapping many areas. How do you keep informed? You basically need to have a ton of RSS feeds, poke around the monitoring tools, read a lot of lists.

A lot of activity, most of the time, you only need to be dimly aware of. If a user with a good reputation is editing in a familiar area, there’s little need to check into it further. If a new user has just signed up and is editing, it would be good to take a close look at their edits, and reach out and welcome them to OSM and offer to support their work. Reputation needs to be calculated, and used to filter.

And not just edits. There’s so much going on in the community. The Weekly OSM Summary is super useful, but is only the cream of the global activity. There are OSM events all the time, but it seems mostly German mappers are adding their events to the wiki. Expand User Diaries so these posts are accessible in all sorts of ways, for all kinds of notifications.

Being Social Should Be Simpler

Maybe the general concept is around “Interest”. There are places you might be interested in. There are particular mappers and communities you might be interested in … either because they’re active in an area, or perhaps because they make suspicious edits. Directly in the OSM website, you should be able to manually indicate this interest (by friending a user, set a list of locations); or it can be automatically calculated through analysis and stats of where you’ve been active before.

I started on this idea by adding friend and home location filtering to Diary Entries and Changesets. An ok start, but not everyone uses Diary entries to communicate, and the changesets still include everything … it’s both too much information and not enough. A lot is happening in OSM at any time, and you have limited attention.

There’s definitely a need for some system to do processing and analysis, from the planet diffs. Make these stats visually intriguing, and directly a part of a user or groups activity streams. There’s great experiments visualizing group stats with rankings on altogetherlost, and overall stats. And the personal statistics on neis-one, and heat map are excellent. Bring this directly into osm.org.

Social Design

Currently the user profile page on OSM has two functions … one to view other people, and another as a dashboard for yourself. I think these should start to diverge into two different pages. The User Profile should be grown to give a better idea of what a mapper is up to. The Dashboard would be a focus point for a mapper to stay on top of everything they care about in OSM. So in one page, give a summary of what friends and nearby users are up to, but also what’s happening in places you care about. For many users, myself included, there are many areas you’ve mapped, and would like to keep track of. Right now, you explicitly express interest by declaring your home location. This could be expanded to multiple, manually specified locations (my top 10 areas); or by analysis, a list of your top areas for editing could be automatically compiled.

It’s not only a design challenge, but it’s going to be an architected challenge as well. More social takes a lot more servers.

And don’t require mappers to visit OSM.org to get this. Yes, send emails out with weekly summaries of activity.

Some summary ideas for an activity stream:

* Recent mapping activity in multiple areas you’re interested in. Should be higher level than individual changesets (SteveCoast has made 12 edits over the last week in Seattle), but allow you to dig in further if you want.
* Some visual distinction between trusted vs non-trusted
* Also deal better with “big” edits, bots, etc. Filter these, or make them visually distinct.
* New mappers in these areas, and their activity. Highlight these, it’s a good opportunity to reach out.
* Highly trusted or experienced mappers in these areas, and their activity. Again, sometimes highlight, sometimes filter, depending on the need.
* Non-mapping activity in the area … upcoming mapping parties, other local news.

Last weekend in Seattle, the OSM Foundation Board met “face-to-face”. We get together because no matter how much you try otherwise, there’s way more done in person in a couple intensive days. It cost about 4 or 5k USD this time, and it’s worth the cost. But, I think we’ve always done a terrible job explaining what happens at the Board meetings, and a middling job following up, and those two things are totally related.

I want this meeting to be different. It must be different. This is my fifth year on the Board and final year on the Board (I was elected again this year, but will stand down at the next AGM), and to me, and the entire Board, this is a crucial year for OSM. The face-to-face was the most productive yet, and the most difficult yet. I’m very satisfied. In year’s past, the minutes get published, and various announcements go out through working groups, and that will happen. But it’s insufficient, maybe distilling too far the atmosphere and the messiness of these get togethers.

The Stage

Steve is based in Redmond, and expecting a child any day, so he offered to host and avoid travel. I wasn’t far, relatively, in Chicago. The rest of the Board (excepting RichardF who couldn’t make it) flew in from Europe. I found a cabin near a lake on airbnb, quiet, cosy, and cheap. Henk hired a car, and drove everyone around. We had a meetup Friday night, made some burritos and played Kinect at Steve and Hurricane’s place (and tried to forget we watched Crank 2), and enjoyed the Seattle sunshine (no joke). Sunday Hurricane gave us horse riding lessons!

A regular vacation! Except for the part where we spent 18 hours of our weekend discussing/arguing about OSM in windowless meeting rooms at Microsoft (which we very much appreciate btw!). And the rest of the weekend continuing to talk about it, or even dream about it. Being on the Board is a sacrifice of time, because we all feel deeply responsible to the project and our position.

Presentations

The Board meeting proper started with presentations by Steve and Oliver. Steve hit many of the same themes from his SOTM and SOTM-EU talks, except he left out all the stuff about how awesome OSM is doing. We looked and discussed several graphs of recent statistics. OSM’s growth to date has been beyond imagination, but there’s no shortage of projects that changed the world and then met reality, hard. Looking at some of these, the factors in decline included insular community, lack of direction, and no innovation. That’s what we have to avoid.

Oliver made the point that “We are the Board! Shape the project!”. The Board, and the Foundation, needs to be a functional team, with clear goals and activities, all within the limited volunteer time we have to contribute. Fact at this point is, the Foundation doesn’t have clear objectives, beyond the mission to support but not control the OSM project. To meet goals, we can take action, we can guide and steer, we can spend money. At the end of workshop, there should be a target that guides all our activities towards achievement. Some of the slides were beyond funny management clip art (a guy looking forlorn into the mirror, facing reality) but the point was important. “We are the Board! Shape the project!”

At this point, I thought it would be useful to look at some of the management lessons and differences from HOT. While we are by no means perfect, I do feel there’s good alignment between the organizational side of HOT and the community, largely the same community as OSM. Contrast to OSMF, HOT is very focused in what it does, with clear guidance and priorities and steering. We aren’t afraid of spending money when it’s necessary. We value marketing by the organization (though could be better). There are clear technical needs, and we pay for it. There’s a key attention to the consumption side of map data collection, seeking strategic partnerships with other organizations. We’ve been selective and directive with responsibility, and when necessary, have taken it away. We try to be as transparent as possible, publishing very detailed board minutes.

Goals

We took Oliver’s point and started strategic planning.

OSMF Board meeting traditionally use a simple technique to come to consensus on a topic, whether it’s the agenda of the meeting, or in the case of Seattle, the objectives and activities of the OSMF this year. We brainstorm all our choices on the subject, write them on the whiteboard. Each person gets some number of votes, say 5, and distributes them among the topics. If topics can be grouped together, their count is added together. There’s discussion about the meaning of terms, sometimes a lot of discussion. Iteration to insure that we all have a common understanding. At the end, there’s a list of priorities. I always squirm in this process, because somehow I don’t believe it can work, but inevitably does a pretty good job, and if we need to override, we’re not strict about the methodology.

In less than an hour, we had these goals for 2012.

The World’s Most Used Map OSM is clearly the world’s most used open map, and most open map, and the best map. We want as many people of possible contributing and using OSM, and to do that, the experience of using OSM needs to improve, and where you use OSM can improve.

More Than Just Streets Do you know everything OSM is capable of mapping? Does your neighbor? Does your mayor? OSM is relatively well known in some circles, but it’s full potentially is still opaque to many. We want everyone to know what OSM is about.

Cultivating Leadership of Mappers. Shared Goals Between the Community & OSMF Mapping is driven by mappers, with a clear goal (make the map!), and there’s every reason that with clear goals and empowered members, the OSMF can act strongly. We now have clear goals, and clear expectations of what the management team and working groups can do and achieve, without much prescription on how things happen. This all frees the Board to provide the direction, and the management team and working groups to make the operational decisions.

Easier Contribution for Non-Geeks We debated how this differed from the Most Used Map, and decided it was important enough focus to stand on its own. Usability is certainly related, but more broadly, there’s much to do to improve all kinds of involvement in OSM.

And Again

The bulk of our time was spent translating these goals into actions, and this really was the most difficult part. Some things were quick to decide, like the final switch over to ODbL, but others became very drawn out and very detailed, like the process for site redesign. We touched on every standing issue, and aligned clearly to the goals. PR, list moderation, license change, the management team, working group budgets, SOTM, PR, site redesign, the articles of association.

We all agreed that short term action was needed on almost everything, with mind to how things should play out in the longer term. This meant drawing the above diagram, a lot, to remind ourselves of the urgency. We set big, audacious goals for all parts of the Foundation, with clear deadlines.

With so much on the table, we decided to stay in the room until we had decided on everything, which ended up meaning staying hours late, til there was little sunshine outside (or metaphorically sunshine inside the room) and tension rising. At one point, I was so fed up, I almost walked out, really seeing that if we didn’t resolve the issue at the Board, it wouldn’t resolve in the Foundation and the project, the goals wouldn’t be met, and decline was inevitable. And for me personally, that would mean a slow turning away from a project ingrained in almost everything I do in the world. We had to push through.

And we did. Despite looking over the brink, we had resolve. I felt tense, but knew I’d be happy with what we accomplished.

And after it was all done, we had some beers. The next day we rode horses. Group hug.

Thanks to the 2012 Board. This is going to be the year.

And thanks to Oliver Kuhn for the photos!

Kate Chapman and I were invited to speak at the World Bank Transport Forum, on OpenStreetMap and Transport and ICT … which is great, cause I’m a transport geek (honestly disappointed I missed an earlier session on “Best Practices in Railways”), a long time bicycle advocate (what after yesterday I know as “non-motorized transport”), and there’s many many cool projects in OpenStreetMap.

I gave this presentation, with kudos to osm-talk for pitching in.

Went over pretty well, despite being introduced as an anarchist. Actually, it went really well, and I have a stack of biz cards to follow up on at the World Bank.

My fellow panelists were Eddie from OpenGeo, talking particularly about their work with TriMet and Jon from Ushahidi, talking a bit about an interesting upcoming bicycle project in China. New to us was Todos Somos Dateros, a really interesting citizen engagement in Lima around transport data and feedback, with an overlapping approach to some parts of Map Kibera.

The other half of the day was also at the World Bank, at ICT Days. The session I caught featured guys from Data.gov, data.worldbank.org, Sunshine Foundation, government guys from Singapore and Korea. The key takeaway for me … its a small step for capable governments to open data, but to become open governments means true participation, and that’s not something government can ever do alone, except in the already most responsive and representative governments. For us, that means community technology development, to strengthen citizens and civil society.

Finally, of course the Bank had nice Wine and Cheese. Heard there about an upcoming Water Hackaton back in Nairobi, which fits nicely with ongoing work in Mathare, and older projects like WaterWiki.

cross-posted to GroundTruth Initiative Blog

The State of the Map Scholarship program’s wider objective is to support nascent OpenStreetMap communities by building connections and exposing ideas. The application process is in full swing for 2010, so it’s a good time to look back at the effect 2009 has had on participants. It’s also required as a final report for OSI!

Following SOTM 2009, I took a look forward at what could start to happen. The kinds of things in mind were GPS loans (GPS are still hard to come by and expensive in some places), mapping in marginal and conflict areas, access to satellite imagery, localisation of software and tiles, organization of local chapters, and promotional activities. We also had funds for select follow up activities with some of the participants, to build on promising leads in these areas. Everyone invited in 2009 is still very involved in OpenStreetMap, probably more so … these are true believers. Like Arlindo says, “I don’t think on OpenStreetMap as a hobby anymore” … it’s more of a way of life.

Local chapters made progress. Well, the Foundation is still working to come up with a legal agreement that will work in jurisdictions across the globe (just a little complicated), but that hasn’t stopped local groups from formalizing anyhow. Khan Le has helped form a Vietnam OSGeo local chapter (which can also work as an OSM local chapter), as well as holding mapping parties in Hanoi and Saigon. Fredy Rivera in Columbia used part of his follow up funds to establish a Columbia OSM chapter. Backed by the follow up funds, I actually pushed Latin America as a whole to come together as a chapter, considering the small communities last year, but it was harder to coordinate the decision making at this scale; things have grown anyhow, and along more national lines.

Giorgi was able to take part in a massive local push, by joining the Open Maps Caucasus initiative. He met Jeff Haack at SOTM, the coordinator for the OMC project with JumpStart International. They started there in some of the conflict affected regions in the recent Georgia-Russia conflict.

Abdel in Cairo is sees SOTM 2009 as a key instrument for moving forward in Egypt and may have more to say soon on plans there.

In Cuba, PB kept things moving well despite difficulties like the illegality of GPS, and a failed attempt to get spare servers from Wikimedia (illegal to distribute from the US). He used his follow up funds to attend an SDI meeting in Panama and wave the flag for open data. OSM is increasingly being seen as a core component in national scale Spatial Data Infrastructures in many countries, and PB’s work in Panama made a great push on this issue.

Everyone still sites the major need for GPS units. Brazil used its follow up funds for a GPS loan program, and just distributed the first of the units. Julio in Chile used funds to purchase GPS units also but within the dire emergency of the Chilean earthquake. Despite the difficult times there, OSM has continued strongly. Columbia has also been contributing to the relief effort in Chile, and Haiti.

Pushing for cross border collaborations doesn’t necessarily work. Though everyone gets along wonderfully, OSM is still seen often through nation state boundaries. So as in Latin America, the same in the even trickier relationship between India and Pakistan. Professor Rai in Ludhiana has done amazing work, including an impactful effort to map the enterity of Gill village. Across the border, in Multan, Professor Rasul has been pushing ahead in the pursuit of open mapping. The follow up grants to them were meant to both strengthen their own programs, and encourage them to collaborate across that difficult border, as both lie within the former region known collectively as Punjab. Map Punjab is intended to be a site with localizations, in both language, national borders, and historic borders, as well as a point of technical and social collaboration. So far, it hasn’t materialized. Some things take longer to brew.

Elsewhere in India, Arun Ganesh does lament the long gestation of OpenStreetMap in India, though his strategy to increase visibility seems wise. Rather than focus on open data in the extract, he’s producing beautiful maps, especially of transit systems, that are only now possible with OSM data. Nic Roets is taking a similar tack in South Africa cooperating on mapping World Cup venues. Finally, Ciprian in Romania is collaborating with companies using OpenStreetMap.

So, different stories all over, but the same core story is individuals energized by the experience of SOTM, growing OSM naturally and with purpose. Can’t wait to see what’s next, and especially who’s coming in 2010, and what might develop from there.

“What would it take to map an entire country?”

With the growing visibility of Map Kibera, that question is coming more frequently, especially in Africa, where both OpenStreetMap and traditional mapping are widely absent. This is a massive question, which is going to depend very much on circumstances of that country, and on who is asking that question; and in the end may be better answered by a different question. In response to a couple queries, from Liberia and Malawi, I decided to write up a few blog posts to start off those conversations, and serve as reference for any of the other 200+ countries on this planet. To start, going look at a few examples to serve as models for answering the question.

Up front, the question assumes one very important thing; the historical growth pattern of OSM isn’t happening. Traditionally, a few individuals had their minds blown by a conference presentation on OSM, or maybe a random blog post somewhere, and they start mapping their home town. And when that looks to be a big task, and they start eyeing the next town, they start recruiting others through mapping parties. A mailing list is set up. The virus starts to spread, and OSM might get the attention of a local government or two, maybe some companies, and soon, the country is well on its way to being mapped. The growth is organic. It might take years. The preconditions are important. Roughly, there has been an active community already of technically proficient people who have leisure time, perhaps already contributing to open source projects. In other countries, there may not be a technical community, or socioeconomic conditions make leisure time a valuable and scarce. Other places may be in conflict. These are places where people start to consider intentional interventions to get mapping going.

The first place I took part in an intentional effort was India. Now, India is well known for having a broad and highly skilled technical base, but at least in 2008, there was proportionally small open source community. There had been interest in mapping through the Free Map project, and Schuyler and I took the invitation to promote OSM through a slightly insane schedule of mapping parties in 7 Indian cities in one month. A wonderful experience. But it did not instantly translate into a frenzy of mapping activity. The idea gestated for a time, and slowly, individuals took up the cause, and now the OSM India community is vibrant, centered in cities. One place to note is Mumbai, despite extensive interest, is still not active, largely due to an import of AND data that turned out to be much less than accurate, discouraging further editing. An issue we’re still looking at, and generally, I’ll talk about existing data sources and imports in another post.

Palestine was a very intentional mapping, first of the entire West Bank, and then of Gaza. JumpStart International funded a project to create a complete, public domain map of all roads. We estimated a time of about 6 months, which turned out to be accurate (more on time estimates in another post). The approach taken was to hire engineering graduates, in teams based in each region, train them through mapping parties, and coordinate the incoming data. Gaza was not to be mapped, but the 2009 crisis there motivated the remote OSM community to fund raise to purchase recent satellite imagery of the entire strip, and trace remotely. After the conflict was over, JumpStart entered Gaza and built up a team to enhance that work with a combination of GPS tracing and imagery. The result is a complete road map of Palestine. However, no sustained OSM community of interested individuals, local companies, local government, and UN agencies is left. The individuals involved saw this as temporary paid work, and many of them have taken jobs outside Palestine. The wider community wasn’t engaged with an aim to build capacity. So now, even though Israeli OSM has been interested to hold joint activities with Palesinte, and Ramallah now has street names, the map isn’t being updated.

In Kenya, we haven’t set out to map the entire country, but it seems like the base we’ve built in Kibera is ready to spread throughout Nairobi and beyond. We’ve focused heavily on Kibera, but with the idea always that the group here, and the entire community, will be able to take the project forward. The impact of mapping a place that was unmapped, and considered unmappable, has made a great impression within civil society, the government, and the UN. We’ve taken a lot of time to outreach to others already working with map data. The approach is more like planting a single seed, nurturting it, and then allowing it to grow. It’s yet to be seen how this pans out.

JumpStart started next working in Georgia. Their approach is now long term but different. They have first focused on conflict areas, following the Georgia-Russia conflict in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and also in the capital, Tbilisi. From this start, they are building a country wide network of regional offices, Open Maps Caucasus, supported by an NGO structure. They are producing curriculum, hiring a team, and doing extensive outreach with map data users. The question to my mind is the long term sustainability of the structure. If JumpStart decides to stop supporting the NGO structure, will it be able to find more funding to keep going? And if that doesn’t materialize, will a community be in place to take it forward organically? Again, yet to be seen, and a question they are certainly considering.

In the USA, mapping hadn’t taken off until last year. This was perhaps due to the TIGER data set, available public domain. CloudMade set out to initiate this community by hiring community ambassadors in regions throughout the country, and holding mapping parties. One of the most spectacular was the Atlanta mapping weekend, involving hundreds of people in cooperation with the Atlanta municipal government. However, after a time CloudMade discontinued the ambassadors program. From there, what has developed has looked like a more traditional growth, with a wide spectrum of individuals, companies, organizations, and government getting interested and involved. The GeoDC group has been very active, and recently OSMF US has incorporated. Hard to calculate what effect the intentional effort of CloudMade had on this growth, though it was certainly a contribution.

Finally, many have seen the extremely rapid growth of the map in Haiti. Prior to the quake, very little data existed there for familiar reasons. Following the disaster, and the release of imagery for derived works and other data sources, remote mappers quickly and spectacularly produced comprehensive maps of Port au Prince and much of the country. Mappers wanted to contribute to the relief effort. Certainly in other unmapped places, remote mappers are motivated to contribute just out of interest. If you look at any capital city covered by Yahoo imagery, there will have been remote mappers contributing at least geometries. Does this translate to places not in crisis, but in more prolonged issues that prevent mapping? Probably to some extent, but not nearly as focused and quick, and very much dependent on imagery. But imagery is not enough. Local knowledge is needed to name places, and identify features … most roofs don’t tell you what’s going on inside a building. In Haiti, two deployments have gone to advocate, train, and build capacity for OSM locally. Nicolas is now planning to go again, as part of our long term plan for OSM in Haiti, to continue the work to the point where the Haitian community, which includes their government and civil society actors, are ready to take it forward.

This weekend, Nicolas Chavent and Robert Soden will deploy to Haiti for the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team. MapAction and OCHA are facilitating this mission, with generous support from the European Commission Humanitarian Aid Department — many thanks to MapAction and ECHO for helping to make this happen. Nicolas and Robert are a dream team for this work, adventurous and passionate map makers. They are joined by experienced MapAction volunteer Chris Philips. Broadly, the mission is to support use of OpenStreetMap on the ground in Haiti within groups of UN and international responders, the Haitian government, and Haitian civil society. In other words, make sure OpenStreetMap stays relevant and useful into the recovery, reconstruction, and, most crucially, long term development of Haiti.

They won’t be going in alone, but with thousands of mappers globally ready to back them up.

This pioneering trip has emerged from several threads. Nicolas and I identified the need in our meeting in January, and published in the HOT Haiti Strategy and Proposal. The remote response of OSM has been very effective in the initial response, with high visibility and urgent need for data sets, but as time goes on, geodata management processes are put in play on the ground, and capacity building to use OSM within those processes is very much needed. OSM has to meet these communities half way to be effective, and the only way now to really understand deeply is to go to Haiti. The second thread has been a long running discussion between MapAction and OSM. I really admire the work of MapAction; they deploy rapidly and create maps by any means necessary in the crucial first days after a disaster, all through volunteer professionals. They first used OSM in their work last year in the Philippines, and we have long wanted to learn from each in how open source and open data can be deployed in emergencies. Third thread was the incredible World Bank deployment last month; Schuyler Erle and Tom Buckley had tremendous insights and made key connections with government and the UN that we hope to build on. Wonderfully, Tom has redeployed to Haiti. Final thread is the ongoing collaboration with Ushahidi and Kartier par Kartier, and their work to build local and diaspora capacity to take the Haiti Ushahidi install on in the long term. This definitely involves base mapping, and there’s an interest in linking in our approach, and eventually Map Kibera like projects in Haiti.

In detail, Nicolas and Robert will be doing hands on training and lots of conversing to assess needs and find solutions that integrate with OSM. Their work will address all levels. At the UN and international NGO level, we are blessed with many good contacts through Nicolas, MapAction, OCHA and myself, and are very eager to continue cooperation. CNIGS (Haitian national mapping agency) and CIAT (main government development coordinating body) have been working with the World Bank and others to rebuild themselves, and their capacity with new technologies; there’s interest here in really getting a solid national road network data set, with addressing. And within civil society, KpK has established an amazing grass roots network. Sabina Carlson from Ushahidi and Shadrock Roberts from KpK will also be in Haiti at the same time as the HOT mission.

The preparations have been intense. We’ve spent the last month budgeting, planning travel, getting equipment sorted, discussing the plan. Haiti is still in chaos, and perhaps even more so within the international responders as their hard work goes on and on. Not certain at this moment where there’s space to throw up Robert’s and Nicolas’ tents. Nearly certainly they are landing in Port au Prince on Sunday afternoon (with risks of delays). It will be Agile at its highest. Sourcing all the appropriate equipment has been intensive … printers, computers, and GPS units are on their way down, need to perform in difficult conditions, and find a good long term home. Software and data work is ongoing, including iterations of Map on a Stick. Clear training materials, including approaches relevant to short-on-time GIS and data collectors new to OSM, are being compiled.

Nicolas has spent a great deal of time on the Humanitarian Data Model. This work reconciles data models and schemas in various response sectors, maps to OSM map features, and works to engage new tools for Extract-Transform-Load processes, and JOSM presets. In other words, make OSM directly relevant to the systems already in use in Haiti. The OpenStreetMap community is invited to review and join the discussion on this process.

I’m very excited for this mission, and wish the best of luck and safe travels to Nicolas and Robert. Hopefully their busy schedule will allow for some updates and documentation. We’ll be listening closely to support whatever they need from afar.