Five years ago, the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) was selected through the Audacious Project with a bold ambition: to demonstrate how open, community-driven geospatial data could help close critical information gaps affecting people’s lives.

That support enabled HOT and our global network to deliver impact at scale, mapping areas where more than one billion people live, strengthening local mapping communities, and establishing regional hubs across Africa, Asia-Pacific, and Latin America and the Caribbean. More than 760,000 contributors and a strong ecosystem of open technology, community leadership, and partners on the ground, made this a success.

This work translated into tangible outcomes across very different contexts, and at a range of depths and breadths, for example:

Photo: Infographic showing the breadth and depth of community-driven mapping impact across countries, highlighting examples from Sierra Leone, Kenya, Guatemala, and Türkiye/Syria, and detailing how data in Freetown supported flood mitigation, waste services, disability access, and a $5M climate adaptation proposal.

Reaching one billion people mapped marks an important transition, not an endpoint.

The map is always in motion. Migration, displacement, conflict, climate change and disasters continuously reshape communities. At the same time, as baseline maps become more available, governments, humanitarian actors, and communities are increasingly asking for deeper, more detailed, and locally grounded data to guide climate adaptation, urban development, public health, and disaster risk reduction.

Meanwhile, HOT’s global network has matured. Many mappers who began as volunteers or hobbyists now lead locally rooted organizations capable of delivering advanced, high quality geospatial data.

Photo: Community members in Northern Uganda reviewing a map of contraceptive service access points to support reproductive health planning and advocacy.

In our next phase, our goal is to scale local community mapping. HOT is evolving how our work is delivered with the goal of enabling local partners to lead projects for global partners. This new model means that locally-led teams are paid for their mapping and can produce more sophisticated data at scale, which will increase our impact and strengthen financial sustainability.

We will provide local community groups and community entrepreneurs with training and accreditation in mapping tools, and project management skills to lead mapping and drone projects that are paid for by our partners. In a shift from our previous model which often relied on volunteering, this model will connect paying organisations who need data with trusted local mapping teams who can deliver it. Our partners will receive quality-assured, open data aligned with humanitarian and public-interest use at a much lower price than current market competition.

Picture: Brazil Singh, voting member and Open Mapping Guru, leads a field mapping exercise in Dhaka's informal settlements.

Volunteer-driven mapping remains the foundation of HOT’s work, enabling rapid disaster response, global solidarity, and the maintenance of open geographic data as a public good. This will continue to be a part of our model, particularly for our work in conflict and disasters. In this new phase, we will add complementary pathways for mappers who wish to deepen their engagement through skills development, quality-assured contributions, and economic opportunities, while continuing to value volunteer participation and community leadership.

We anticipate this transition will be a five year, $55 million initiative. HOT has secured $11 million in seed funding through the Audacious Project. Reaching the full ambition will depend on continued collective investment to build a sustainable, locally-led model with lasting public interest impact.

HOT is participating in the 100x Impact Accelerator at the London School of Economics and Political Science to gain insights from mentors and other high-impact ventures on how to tackle this next phase of growth. HOT is exploring how to build on our success to-date and what needs to adapt and grow in order to unlock the potential within communities around the world.

Our goal is not perpetual growth as an organization, but sustained impact; where scale accelerates through community leadership. This next chapter will ensure that open data remains not just a public good, but a locally owned and economically viable one. We are deeply grateful to the Audacious Project and to the many donors, partners, and communities who have made this moment possible.

Together we are making sure that community data improves lives and livelihoods across the world.