Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team

Last week I attended a meeting to discuss expanding the community mapping projects using OSM eastern Indonesia, as well as ensuring they are sustainable.  Attendees included myself as well as representatives from AIFDR, ACCESS, SOLUD, Mitra Turatea and GIZ. HOT did our first workshop with community facilitators from ACCESS in March of 2011. Much has changed since the initial workshop, which was just a traditional OpenStreetMap training session over two days.

The week I arrived in Saint-Marc occurred the Night Of the Living Maps (NOTLM), a worldwide event within the OSM community, “where all mappers come together in local meetings and trace imagery the whole night long, while the moon shines bright!”. Groups form large and capital cities like Bogotá, Copenhagen, Madrid, Paris - Rome, Vienna, St. Petersburg orTokyo - were participating but also smaller ones like Esslingen, Mankato, MN , Passau or Rapperswil. Anyway, it was an excellent opportunity for the freshly trained young mappers of Saint-Marc to both figure out the power of the OSM community and show their own enthusiasm to the open source geodata.

Rapid growth and low elevation makes flooding in Jakarta problematic. Innovative approaches are needed for contingency planning and impact modeling.  DKI Jakarta's Disaster Management Agency (BPBD) is developing a detailed scenario to estimate impacts of future flooding. This scenario will estimate the impact on people, schools, hospitals, and other important buildings. Such a scenario will become a powerful tool for local government and other stakeholders to take action to be better prepared for future floods. This first step in this type of analysis is having available data, without data it is impossible to make an accurate estimation. Throughout March mapping events will be held in DKI Jakarta to work with local leaders to collect such data, by utilizing OpenStreetMap.