Photo by Anna Hodgkinson

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An email to the HOT list from Nicholas Chavent earlier this month (March 2011) announced the opportunity to participate in a Mapping Party for the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team – yep a “HOT” Mapping Party. Many OpenStreetMap enthusiasts would be familiar with the notion of a Mapping Party. Mapping parties are local social events with a focus on having fun while mapping for OpenStreetMap an open licensed map of the world. But what’s a HOT mapping party? HOT mapping parties are for OSM enthusiasts who are also interested in humanitarian mapping. We all know maps form a critical part of disaster response. But how can HOT and OSM be better prepared for the eventuality of assisting during a disaster? Disaster mapping in contrast to general OSM mapping has some specific requirements.

Disaster response must incorporate good geographic data collection practices:

During disasters mapping serves to allow quick and accurate decision making. But there can be no maps without any data. So good disaster response workflows incorporate good geo data collection practices. The HOT Kit is designed to do just this. Over the last year the HOT team has been working in Haiti and have continued to refine and add to a HOT Kit. HOT Kit merges traditional practices of disaster response coordination with the best that the open source geospatial tool-set has to offer.

In the event of a disaster mapping sits close to the planning, support and coordination units. Map-makers working in these efforts must be ready to answer any number of questions thrown at them by the coordinators of the disaster response. Thus being organized and knowing where everything is, is critical, an important goal of the HOT Kit. The kit is organised as five top-level folders under which sit almost anything a HOT team member supporting an operation would need.

Steps during a response will include data collection, cleaning and merging and product creation. The product creation may involve analysis and summarizing. Supporting the operation means having all the data and analysis at your finger tips. In addition it requires a systematic procedure for collection of geographic data and its inclusion into the map making process.

Hot Kit systematizes the steps of map making during disasters:

So the five root directories of HOT Kit are

00_DATA/         <--- geo data ready for use
01_SURVEYS/      <--- data collection
02_PROJECTS/     <--- desktop GIS projects (QGIS being default)
03_PRODUCTS/     <--- products like pdf, shpfiles, garmin files, kml
04_SUPPORT_DOCS/ <--- a kitchen sink of documentation

OSM community must get to know and help refine the HOT Kit: As the HOT Kit gets used it will continue to change and improve. HOT Kit must be able to handle changing requirements based on the kind of project or disaster its being used in. It also needs to elegantly support users of varying skills. Lastly it needs eyeballs. To help folks quickly getting acquainted with the HOT kit I have just published a ruby gem: https://github.com/sabman/HOT-Kit-Generator

HOT Kit Generator is only a day old gem written during the drive from Brittany to Paris. Its aimed at quickly creating a fresh HOT Kit for a new deployment. It currently only stubs out the folders needed during a HOT deployment. This is done based on a configuration file that defines the directory structure of a HOT Kit. My vision for this generator is to allow pulling distributed web and data resources using a single command to create an up-to-date HOT kit in seconds. Allowing different configurations depending on the disaster type, geographic region or project goals or length.

Give it a try and feel free to fork to get started on some of the TODO items. I would also appreciate any feedback on the idea itself.

On-ground surveys and OSM tags:

Once a HOT team is in the field and collecting data, they should be making the most of the opportunity. This means collecting details that would only be available to someone in close proximity to the resource being mapped. This is where the HOT tagging and forms come in. Over the last few months a number of HOT team members have been developing forms for the OSM Humanitarian Data Model. This along with the Humanitarian Data Model presets in JOSM can make the task of data entry after a survey go a lot smoother. Nicholas Chavent’s work on HDM is particularly impressive.

Role of remote mappers and tagging:

In an emergency the focus is on saving lives. Depending on the kind of disaster the tagging scheme will vary but the regular tags in OSM aren’t always compatible with the needs of first responders. As the HOT team matures so will their ability to engage with the regular OSM mappers who are willing to help support disaster mappers often using satellite imagery. As an arm-chair mapper, instead of mapping for fun you are mapping to create raw data which will form input into products that can give actionable information to first responders.

So where does Haiti-like remote mapping fit into a disaster response. Mapping a disaster from home can be a very useful activity. Useful to the first responders, provided some common sense is applied to the process. For one thing mappers who want to assist in the work of HOT should look at the current mapping priorities here: Current Humanitarian OSM Team Projects Then its worth noting that the mapping you do from home can give first responders some very useful base data. In the case of Haiti it was location of IDP camps, destroyed buildings, blocked roads and landslides. These are all things that first responders can take and plan their missions. It should however be noted that its possible only if the imagery is of high enough resolution. Haiti was and still is, an exception, where sub-meter post disaster imagery was made public and as a result the first-responders were able to save many lives. But we have yet to see such high resolution and clear images for other disasters. So when mapping from home its better to err at the side of caution and not tag an item if you are unsure. Having said that there is no doubt that some data is better than no data and so getting as much of the base infrastructure such as transports, hydrology, admin and populated areas mapped is a good thing.

Long live the HOT Mapping party:

Finally one man without whom the HOT mapping party in Beg-Meil would never happened was Roderic Bera. He was behind the smooth running of the weekend, having organized everything ranging from food to accommodation to transport – it was all very well thought out. Thank you Rod. Then of course Nicholas and Fredric worked late into the night on Friday to get everything to do with the mapping ready. Fred’s mock reports of a humanitarian crisis in Brittany and Beg-Meil read like a true forced migration.

Thanks to all who came and made the HOT mapping party possible, in order of appearance:

• Nicholas Chavent
• Roderic Bera
• Frederic Bonifas
• Manuel Robert
• Maxime Leguillier
• Anna Hodgkinson
• Joseph Reeves
• Rodolphe Quiedeville

A special thanks to Manuel for letting me hang at his place in Paris on Sunday night. Good luck to him and Maxime in Haiti. Until next time.