VGI / OSM in Humanitarian and Development Activities

How is OSM used for Humanitarian Response?

After OSM was created, it did not take long before the humanitarian community, including aid workers, crisis and disaster response teams to leverage this platform for quickly gathering and deploying spatial information in times of urgent need. This included a variety of organizations such as Crisis Mappers, GISCorps, Standby Task Force, the Digital Humanitarian Network, Missing Maps, MapGive, and the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, and others. Together this community has organized the contribution of map data to the most pressing emergencies in recent history. Much of this data has been contributed to the OSM platform.

While typically volunteers have tended to be geospatial professionals, humanitarian workers, or local communities, increasingly students at universities remote to the disaster are getting involved. Read this account of how students at George Washington University (co-founder of YouthMappers) mapped Kathmandu before and during the earthquakes of 2015 in Nepal. See more stories on the YouthMappers Blog pages.

To organize such quick responses when many volunteers may be online at the same time, the HOT team develops specific software tools to improve coordination. Their special software to sort out such "tasks" is the go-to platform for this community, their HOT Tasking Manager, that was first deployed in 2011. Read this short blog about the Global Footprint of Tasking Manager (Be sure to explore the map!).

How is OSM used for Development?

While the urgent needs of disasters and crises motivate thousands of contributors to rally around open spatial data creation, sometimes at a moment's notice, there are many places in the world where vulnerability is chronic and development needs are present in a persistent way. The same approach that was developed for disaster and crisis mapping or humanitarian response teams, can be used to gather open spatial data on vulnerability and resilience and used to support long term decision making and planning for development. The USAID GeoCenter is focused on this sustained approach through its Mapping for Resilience Program.

In recognition of the increasingly important role that students and faculty play in these mapping efforts, USAID supported the creation of a university consortium focused on OSM for development and the YouthMappers network was launched as a way to also sustain and nurture the longer term engagement of volunteer mappers who are university students.

Service Learning Perspectives

How will we work together to create data for humanitarian and development needs?

First of all, the course is organized where you will be working on teams. Everyone knows that group work is sometimes fun and sometimes can be not so much fun. It is important that your group functions as a team. Read through Chapter Four of this book to discover some ways to facilitate the development of your group and the success of your project. Refer to the checklist on page 73, exercise 4.9 as your team begins to work together.

Another aspect of your service learning experience will be to engage with a YouthMappers chapter in the country where your project is taking place. Creating these cultural connections is not always easy or straightforward, especially when done virtually and remotely. It is important to get a solid understanding of how our mindsets may affect our work, and our collaborations. Read through Chapter Five and reflect on some of the unique ways that online volunteer mapping relate to difference, culture, power, and privilege.

RELFECTION QUESTIONS

Q: What are the similarities and differences between mapping for humanitarian response and mapping for development purposes?

Q: What unique support might students need as volunteers for open mapping for humanitarian or development projects?

Q: What is your best advice for what a group should do to work together well? How can we make sure each member does a fair share of the tasks? What agreements will your team put in place to deal with conflict or groupthink?

Q: What can be done to minimize misattribution?

Q: How might power, marginalization, discrimination, and privilege affect the relationships among your class team members? How might they affect the international collaboration with the YouthMappers chapter in your project country?