Joseph Reeves, a contributor to Humanitarian OpenStreetMap, 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maps are uniquely valuable to humanitarian work, especially in places where base map data is often scarce, out of date, or rapidly changing.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.
"Humanitarian OpenStreetMap: mapping the future of crisis response" by Joseph Reeves
13 June 2014