Presented at: All Things Open 2019 Presented by: Leila Alderman, Spreedly

1. Save the World
From Your Couch
With Open-Source Mapping
Leila Alderman
All Things Open 2019

2. Hello!

3. If you can trace lines with a mouse,
you can help save lives!

4. Agenda
● Why does open-source mapping matter?
● What is OpenStreetMap?
● What is humanitarian mapping?
● 2010 Haiti earthquake
● Bidibidi
● Women Connect
○ Tanzania
○ Paraguay
○ Peru
● How to get started with humanitarian mapping

5. Why does open-source mapping matter?

6. Free maps are ubiquitous

7. Free maps are ubiquitous …..Right?

8. Newsflash: They aren’t really free!

9. They don’t map everywhere

10. They lack detail

11. They don’t map key humanitarian features

12. “For most of human history, maps have been very exclusive. Only a few
people got to make maps, and they were carefully guarded, and they
were not participatory.
Marie Price, the first female president of the American Geographical Society

13. What is OpenStreetMap?

14. It’s a map!

15. The Wikipedia of mapping
● “OpenStreetMap is a free, editable
map of the whole world that is being
built by volunteers largely from
scratch and released with an
open-content license.”
● OSM actively encourages new and
interesting uses of its map data

16. Adding map data
● Detailed OSM data can be added by
uploading GPS tracks recorded while
walking, biking, or driving
● Mapping can also be done by tracing
over aerial imagery, called “armchair
mapping”

17. Remember Tica?

18. Rome, Italy
Google Maps
OpenStreetMap

19. Paris, France
Google Maps
OpenStreetMap

20. San Francisco, CA, USA
Google Maps
OpenStreetMap

21. Chicago, IL, USA
Google Maps
OpenStreetMap

22. Very detailed maps

23. Hiking trails in Germany

24. Inline skate across Germany!

25. OpenSeaMap

26. OpenStreetMap is used everywhere

27. Developing with OpenStreetMap

28. What is humanitarian mapping?

29. Humanitarian mapping goals
● Provide maps to support humanitarian disaster relief
● Encourage community development
● Develop open-source apps and tools for Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders,
UN agencies, and local NGOs and communities

30. Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team
● Founded as a US nonprofit in 2010
after the idea was proven during
the Haiti earthquake
● Provides many different mapping
support services
● Responds to global crises

31. Missing Maps Initiative
● Each year, natural disasters kill nearly 100,000 people and affect 200 million,
many in places that are literally missing from any map
● Proactive mapping initiative to map high vulnerability areas where data is scarce

32. Missing Maps: Impact

33. 2010 Haiti Earthquake

34. Haiti
● The poorest country in the
Western Hemisphere
● Low construction standards and
no building codes
● Officially designated
“economically vulnerable”

35. 2010 earthquake aftermath
● 7.0 magnitude earthquake followed
by 52 aftershocks of 4.5 or greater
● 90% of the buildings in the capital,
Port-au-Prince, were destroyed
● Approximately 160,000 deaths and
3 million people affected

36. Relief efforts
● Many countries dispatched rescue
and medical teams and engineers
● The single-runway airport was
handling planes landing or taking
off every two minutes

37. Damaged infrastructure hampered aid efforts
● All Port-au-Prince hospitals were
severely damaged or destroyed
● Many roads and bridges were
blocked or broken
● Main road between Port-au-Prince
and Jacmel remained blocked for
ten days after the earthquake

38. OpenStreetMap volunteer efforts
● 500 OSM volunteers used daily
updates of satellite imagery to plot
accurate maps of Haiti
● OSM volunteers mapped
destroyed bridges, collapsed
buildings, refugee camps, and road
obstacles

39. OpenStreetMap successes
● Search and rescue teams were able
to use these maps to aid efforts
from day one
● Files were updated several times
per hour to keep up with the
rapidly improving maps

42. “The most amazing thing to me about this global response... is the
degree to which volunteers have been able to make a significant impact
on the relief situation while sitting at their own desks, thousands
of miles away.
Schuyler Erle, co-founder of OpenLayers and author of Mapping Hacks and Google Maps Hacks

43. Bidibidi

44. South Sudanese Civil War
● Lasted from 2013 until 2018
● 400,000 estimated deaths
● More than 4 million displaced

45. Bidibidi
● The world’s largest refugee camp in
2017
● During the peak of the crisis, over
7,000 people were arriving per day

46. Refugee crisis
● Hundreds of people lacking water
● Rapid spread of HIV
● Refugees tied to trees so that they
can’t make food distribution times

47. HOT mapathon
● In July 2017, HOT led a mapathon effort funded by the U.S. Department of State
● Collaborated with Doctors Without Borders to train refugees to map
● Unique opportunity to have the direct beneficiaries of humanitarian mapping
work and learn alongside aid workers

48. Mapathon successes
● Over 1,660 buildings and 3,000
meters of roads mapped
● Surveyed communities to map
lighting, education, movement, safety,
water, and hygiene

49. Remote mapathons + local knowledge
● Maps were drawn remotely based on
satellite imagery by the global HOT
community
● Local routes were added by recording
the movement of local motorcycle
taxis

50. Bidibidi: Transformation to a city
● Today, Bidibidi is a city of a quarter million people that is twice the size of Paris
● Uganda is investing in permanent infrastructure and buildings

51. Ongoing mapping efforts
● With smartphones, map data can be
crowdsourced 24/7
● Map data are openly available for
fellow refugees and for host country
governments, UN, and NGOs

53. Women Connect

54. 2018 USAID Women Connect Challenge
● USAID == United States Agency for
International Development
● HOT was awarded a grant as one of 9
winners out of more than 500
applicants from 89 countries

55. HOT’s Women Connect project
● HOT plans to train young women in
three communities to collect and plot
data using open-source maps:
○ Tanzania
○ Paraguay
○ Peru

56. Project goals
● Empower and support female
mappers in areas where leaders are
not typically female
● Bridge the digital gender divide
● Create data on gendered problems

58. “Maps are ultimately embodied subjects that cannot be considered
separate from the people that created them.
“Quantifying gendered participation in OpenStreetMap”

59. Why do female mappers matter?

60. Women Connect:
Tanzania

61. FGM in Tanzania
● 15% of women in Tanzania have
undergone FGM
● FGM can lead to prolonged bleeding,
infection, infertility, and even death
● FGM is illegal in Tanzania, but few
resources are provided to prevent it

62. Mugumu safe house
● Helps girls running away from home
and forced FGM
● 230 girls arrived last year

63. Difficulties
● The safe house receives tips on girls who are in danger
● Rural Tanzania is poorly mapped, making it very difficult to find the girls

64. Tanzania Development Trust
● Using OpenStreetMap, the workers
at the safe house are able to map the
surrounding area
● Aims to train 400 community
members in rural areas in 2019

65. Women Connect:
Paraguay

66. Geochicas
● Organization of women mappers in
Latin America
● Mapped femicides in Nicaragua
● Ranked public spaces based on
violence against women in Mexico

67. Paraguay project
● Aims to train 100 community
members to map key vulnerability
indicators for women
● Mapping informal shelters and
reproductive health services

69. Women Connect:
Peru

70. Peru
● Urban, wealthy areas of Peru are well
mapped, but other areas aren’t
● Cusco has one of the highest
incidence rates of gender violence in
Peru

71. “As a teenager who lives in Cusco, I have felt on many occasions that my
opinion has been devalued or ignored... I have not had many
opportunities to present my ideas and for them to be been considered by
a group of people who have the power to decide and implement changes.
Abril Gomez, student at GAL School

72. Global Active Learning (GAL) School
● Training 150 high school students in
Cusco to identify and map
under-represented social issues
● Smartphones provided to students by
a grant from HOT

73. Mapping sexist publicity
● High schoolers mapped and
categorized sexist advertising that
they found
● Categorized the advertising
○ Objectification of women
○ Perpetuation of gender roles
○ Unrealistic expectations of female bodies

75. Giving girls a voice
● The students created campaigns
based on their maps of sexist
publicity and behavior
● Presented as part of an international
festival and to local government
representatives

76. How to get started with
humanitarian mapping

77. Mapping is easy!
● Anyone with a computer and
internet access can map
● No coding or GIS experience
required
● Validation means that you don’t
need to worry about lack of
experience

78. OpenStreetMap
● Go to https://openstreetmap.org
● Click the “Sign Up” button in the upper right corner

79. Mapping tutorial
● When you first sign in and click “Edit”, OSM gives you a walkthrough

80. Tracing satellite imagery

82. Logging into the HOT Tasking Manager
● Go to https://tasks.hotosm.org
● Logging in uses the same account that you created for OSM

84. HOT Tasking Manager
● Used for collaborative mapping
efforts
● Divides up the area to be mapped
into small squares
● Tracks project progress and prevents
duplicate work

86. Map of current projects

87. Project details
● Project teams create detailed
instructions
● Lists out any project-specific
guidelines, such as which tags should
be used

88. Project map
● The map shows the current project
area with color coded squares
indicating progress
● Locked squares are currently being
worked on
● Select a white square or let the
Tasking Manager pick a random
square

89. Selecting an area to map
● After selecting a square to map, the
OSM map editor will open in a new
window with a pink square overlay
● This square indicates the mapping
area that you have checked out
● Don’t map outside of this square!

90. Recording your work
● After you’ve finished editing the map
and you’ve saved your edits, go back
to the HOT Tasking Manager screen
● Add a note to describe your work
● If you finished mapping the entire
task area, click “Mark as completely
mapped”
● Otherwise, click “Stop mapping” so
that someone else can pick this up
later

91. Additional Resources
● OpenStreetMap wiki
○ https://wiki.openstreetmap.org
○ OSM’s wiki, which has lots of great information
● OpenStreetMap US Slack
○ https://osmus-slack.herokuapp.com/
○ OSM US-based Slack chat
○ Amazing resource for asking questions!
● Learn OSM
○ http://learnosm.org
○ great beginner’s guide
● Mapping guides
○ https://labs.mapbox.com/mapping/
○ OSM mapping guides, from beginner to advanced

92. Additional Resources
● OpenStreetMap Wiki
○ https://wiki.openstreetmap.org
○ Lots of great information and detail
● Slack channel for OpenStreetMap US
○ https://osmus-slack.herokuapp.com/
○ Amazing resource for asking questions!
○ If you’re local, there are channels for #nc and #nc-triangle

93. Go forth and save the world!
(from the comfort of your couch)

94. Getting around with OSM

95. Maps.me

96. Navit

97. Locus

98. Magic Earth

99. OsmAnd

100. Just as good as Google
● Turn-by-turn voice navigation
● Night display mode
● Lanes for each intersection
● Public transit routes

101. Map style

102. Offline mapping
● Maps can be downloaded for areas
over WiFi at home
● Greatly reduce your mobile data use

103. Advanced filters

104. Route details

105. Routing settings

106. Find POIs along your route
● Search for points of interest along a route
● Select the type of POI and radius

107. Radius ruler

108. Measure distance

109. Wikipedia

110. Travel guides

111. Edit OSM

112. Privacy

113. Google’s Privacy Policy