HOT Stuff — takeaways from the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team Summit

It’s been nearly 6 years since my first Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) mapathon and last month I finally attended my first HOT Summit in Heidelberg, Germany.

The HOT Summit brings together map nerds (such as myself) from humanitarian organisations, research institutions, local communities, and more. The goal is to learn from each other and share some of the wide range of fascinating projects going on around humanitarian mapping. This year it was in the beautiful city of Heidelberg and run by the great team from Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology (HeiGIT).

So many talks, not enough time

The number of talks sadly outweighed my capability to see them all – whether that be due to them happening simultaneously or getting caught up in various mappy conversations. Luckily, most sessions were recorded so I was able to catch up on some that I missed.

It was great to have so many talks focus on diversity and equality amongst the HOT community, which really brought the ethics of mapping into the spotlight. Topics included:

• the importance of involving local and marginalised communities in mapping their local areas
• numerous initiatives involving women in tech
• a focus on YouthMappers, with six competition winners joining the summit from across the world

Amongst all the impressive numbers and facts about how much has been contributed to OpenStreetMap (OSM) through HOT and Missing Maps, one stand-out statement came from the HOT Indonesia team. Through their work with Facebook, they are now able to say that they have mapped all of the roads in Indonesia! This is an incredible feat and made possible by Facebook’s RapID editor, where mappers verify AI detected map features, rather than tracing them themselves.

As I say there were so many fascinating talks that it’s hard to pick out the best. I’ve mentioned just a few, but I’d suggest that you check them all out for yourself.

Red Cross crew

Okay granted, I’m biased, but it was great to see so much from the Red Cross Red Crescent (RCRC) movement at the summit. The first workshop of the summit was an overview of how OpenStreetMap (OSM) has, and could be used by RCRC to anticipate and respond more effectively to disasters. The question of ‘what more can be done?’ was then pitched to the room of mappers, volunteers and representatives of various organisations. Our group had exciting discussions about how OSM can be used for initial assessments, which were captured beautifully by Tim Sutton from Kartoza and you can see below.

Next up from RCRC was Catalina Jaime’s inspiring keynote talking us through the work of the RCRC Climate Centre, where she explained how OSM data was used for disaster preparedness and response. She ended with the poignant question of how we might be able to involve our global volunteer base of approximately 14 million volunteers (!) to contribute more to OSM.

Finally, Melanie Chabot, from the Canadian Red Cross spoke about how they are using Missing Maps to map indigenous communities. It was a fascinating insight into using Missing Maps for domestic operations and many of the subtle nuances and sensitivities of mapping cultural features, not mapped in OSM before. A prime example of the importance of involving local communities to ensure the map is inclusive of their culture.

A lotta love for MapSwipe

And then there was MapSwipe. I’ve been a part of the MapSwipe team representing the British Red Cross for the past two years. As a globally spread project team, it was nice to have four members of the team in one place and we took the opportunity to make some decisions prior to the then-imminent launch of v2.0 (which I’m happy to say has since been launched). Rather surreally, this all took place in a literal bubble, as a break-out session for others to join.

I also felt like a broken record dropping MapSwipe into every conversation that I could: constantly promoting the upcoming update, the new features and how others could get involved. Excitingly, there were also some discussions about other organisations could leverage MapSwipe in their activities by adding projects of their own.

There’s plenty more to say about MapSwipe, so look out for another blog post soon…

Top takeaway

Deciding a top takeaway can be tough; but for me, it was all about the community. Like-minded individuals from all over the place – geographically, demographically and professionally.

It was incredible to meet so many people who I’ve been working closely with through the British Red Cross and Missing Maps for years. Some familiar faces from the London Missing Maps community, fellow MapAction volunteers, extended Red Cross family but also colleagues that I’ve only ever interacted with digitally. Turns out they are real people!

Of course, that’s not to mention the majority of people that I’ve never met before. The whole event is a fascinating melting pot of the whole community; and the results speak for themselves with all the diverse projects that are going on.

It’s great we’re all able to catch up on the talks from this year and I look forward to seeing what happens next and hopefully having the chance to find out more at next year’s summit.

Thank you to HOT and HeiGIT for organising and hosting such a great event!