What is "Digital Humanitarian Mapping?"
CROWD-SOURCED
HUMANITARIAN MAPPING
It’s hard to get lost in large cities nowadays - digital map services are available at the swipe of our fingers. The time where people needed to carry paper maps along with them seems long gone… However, that’s not true for every part of the world. These places that don't have reliable maps are often more vulnerable than others to various hazards, be it epidemics, earthquakes, droughts, or more. This makes reliable maps even more crucial for humanitarian organizations to offer assistance when necessary.
An urgent need for
Crowd-sourced
Efforts
Digital humanitarian mapping is the creation of digital maps of poorly-mapped areas, whether as immediate crisis response or in an anticipatory manner. This is often achieved with crowd-sourcing, i.e. by asking everyday people to contribute some of their time online to identify buildings, roads, rivers etc. on satellite images of a region. Online tools and websites have been created to make this as easy as possible, so that each of us can lend a ‘digital hand’.
This assignment is an opportunity for students to discover crowd-sourced humanitarian mapping, and partake in a real on-going mapping project. Getting good grades is important, but isn’t it better to get good grades while helping others?
1
LEARNING TO USE HOTOSM TASK MANAGER
During tutorial classes, students are first trained to use the online task manager created by the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team.
2
TASK SELECTION
Students then choose one of the pending mapping tasks uploaded by humanitarian organizations. Each student must then follow the instructions of the task and spend at least three hours mapping.
3
REPORT: CONTRIBUTION AND REFLECTION
Students are not only graded on their mapping efforts, but more importantly their self-evaluations and reflections.
Students then prepare a poster report, explaining the situation of the mapped region, difficulties they have encountered, and insights to how the mapping efforts (both existing and additional ones) could be improved.
