"Humanitarian OpenStreetMap: mapping the future of crisis response" by Joseph Reeves

Past Event

Date
 12 June 2014, 4:30pm - 6:00pm

Location
 Lecture Theatre, Oxford Martin School
34 Broad Street (corner of Holywell and Catte Streets), Oxford, OX1 3BD

This Seminar is co-hosted with the Oxford Martin Programme on Computational Cosmology and is part of the Oxford Martin School Trinity Term seminar series: Trusting the crowd: solving big problems with everyday solutions.

Joseph Reeves, a contributor to Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, will talk about the importance of crowd sourcing and open data in providing information during a humanitarian crisis.

Free, collaborative maps are uniquely valuable to humanitarian work, especially in places where base map data is often scarce, out of date, or rapidly changing. OpenStreetMap is a project to create a free and open map of the entire world, built entirely by volunteers surveying with GPS, digitizing aerial imagery, and collecting and liberating existing public sources of geographic data. The information in OpenStreetMap can fill in the gaps in base map data to assist in responses to disasters and crisis.

This seminar will also be live webcast here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CIoO8oIDlM

About the speaker

Joseph Reeves is an archaeologist working with digital tools. Trained in the more traditional areas of archaeological research, Joseph initially earned a BA (Archaeology, 2004, Cardiff University) which was followed by an MA in the same subject (2005, Cardiff University). Joseph has been employed on the IT department of Oxford Archaeology since 2007; his current job title of Senior IT Support and Development Officer goes some way to describing his duties at the organisation.

Joseph has been a member of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) since 2011 and served on the Board of Directors for the 2013 - 2014 term. He has been deployed to the field in Indonesia to work on our ongoing Disaster Risk Reduction project and has contributed to many further relief efforts from the comfort of his own home. Joseph recently coordinated HOT volunteers to remotely map Syria on behalf of UN OCHA.

HOT continues to expand both the projects undertaken and the number of volunteers involved in them; Joseph is helping develop the organisation, it's methods and it's tools to meet new challenges and goals.