Harry Wood
Bio
I was heavily involved in OpenStreetMap since the early days, as a mapper, developer, documenter, wiki gardener, and communicator within the community. In 2010 I got involved in the Haiti earthquake response, and then with HOT as it formed. It was my honour to serve on the board of HOT from July 2011 until stepping down March 2015.
I remember the chaotic but beatifully organic nature of the Haiti mapping response. It's still one of the best stories to tell. How the OpenStreetMap community came together quite spontaneously (before HOT existed), and produced detailed maps which aid workers then stumbled upon, almost by accident, and found fantastically useful. But I remember two big frustrations at the time. The main priority mapping had been done, and so the huge influx of beginners who arrived keen to help with mapping, were given confused instructions about how to find missing patches to work on. The HOT Tasking Manager was since developed to tackle this, but it was with Typhoon Haiyan onwards that I saw the team really coalesce around some processes with this tool, resulting in really huge disaster responses, welcoming contributions from thousands of new mappers (Described in my Typhoon Haiyan talk). The other frustration at the time of Haiti was that, despite some great responses from some aid agency users, there was a feeling of huge untapped potential when it came to map usage. That was the main focus of a blog post I put out at the time. This remains a problem, although in general the toolsets around OpenStreetMap are improving and becoming less difficult to use all the time. The other fantastic change we have seen, is far more direct involvement from some big humanitarian organisations. MSF and the Red Cross in particular have noticed the benefits of OpenStreetMap to the extent that they're directly involved in getting more people contributing through programmes like The Missing Maps
It's fantastic to observe these things happening, but I've also enjoyed getting stuck in and helping to make these things happen over the years. We're a very open organisation, particularly at the level of practical improvements, so "getting stuck in" is something anyone can do!
In the past I have taken a leading coordination role in many activations. But I like to lead by example. I think it's always good to ground ourselves in doing lots of mapping. The simple thing which we ask new poeple to do, we should be familiar with doing ourselves. Personally I love the simple pleasure making mapping contributions. I don't always have time to do a lot, but I try to do a little, as a sanity check, to ensure our instructions make sense. In addition I often end up doing a lot of wide-range validation (so trying to ensure quality results by doing very broad checks). I think we still need more of this, although The Missing Maps project, and the HOT community are getting smarter when it comes to validation processes driving up quality.
I like to see the wiki being used as a way for us to collaborate on coordinating activations. I think we should make a wiki page per disaster, and link it from the "country" pages on the wiki. Then begin collaborating and organising as necessary from there. Anyone can do that, so it's a good way to spread the workload and get people helping organise things. I actually feel like the Tasking Manager has become too much of a central touchpoint in our processes. Instead we should coordinate on the wiki. I'm very confident with wiki editing though, and I appreciate that not everyone is. The idea would be to assemble some ideas first. Use the Tasking Manager when it's needed. Use other tools, such a bunch of notes, when that works better. But I can see that note-like features could be built into an altnate "project type" in the Tasking Manager. Will be interesting to see if it develops that way.
Posts
Nepal earthquake. We have maps
Since the earthquake struck in Nepal five days ago, 3679 mappers have made 62587 edits to the map (latest stats) It’s an amazing groundswell...
Interview on BBC World News
Last week we had a television interview, with me appearing alongside Andrew Braye from the British Red Cross, and with Pierre Béland joining us...
London HOT Congo Mapathon
What happens when you bring together people from Médecins Sans Frontières, with some people who are experienced OpenStreetMappers, and a bunch of people who...
Some editing stats from the Typhoon Haiyan response
On Friday I presented a talk at the Open Data Institute on "Typhoon Crisis Mapping With OpenStreetMap". You can see the slides and notes...
Thank you Lokku and Happy New Year
HOT is fortunate to have generous supporters around the world. We are a small non-profit that is mainly funded upon projects. Every contribution and donation is...
HOT at PICNIC
I presented the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team at PICNIC festival in Amsterdam. See the video here: Thanks to the European Journalism Centre for inviting HOT...
Finishing off the refugee camp mapping
Last month we asked people to help map refugee camps in Kenya and Ethiopia.It was an excercise in coordination using the HOT Tasking Manager, but this was initially also an experiment testing out various workflows and organisational interactions as part of a "Camp Roberts" excercise for the acquisition and setting up of imagery. We were working with the U.S. State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development using special aerial imagery from NextView. They wanted to see how, given this imagery to trace from, our community could map the refugee camps in a short space of time.
Christmas donation from nestoria
Nestoria have given a very generous donation to the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team In a blog post CEO Ed Freyfogle explains: "...rather than sending our...
Schuyler Erle and John Crowley join the board
We'd like to welcome two new members to the board of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team: Schuyler Erle - Long time pioneer of open Source...
Meeting face-to-face at SOTM Denver
Many members of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team have managed to come together in Denver for the State Of The Map. Things are always a...
Schuyler Erle's presentation at State Of The Map EU
The organisers of State Of The Map Europe have done a great job of rapidly publishing videos of the conference presentations (little camera icons...
Bevölkerungsschutz und Katastrophenhilfe
On May 28th members of the OpenStreetMap community met with employees of the Federal Office of Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance ("Bundesamt für Bevölkerungsschutz...
Japan earthquake and tsunami
OpenStreetMap used as a basemap for live disaster reports We've all been too busy for blogging lately, but the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team is of...
The new HOT logo
It is my pleasure to present the new Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team logo: Throughout December we held a logo design competition, inviting the community to...
Pakistan SPOT imagery coverage extended
The coverage of the SPOT imagery has recently been shifted and much extended, to cover a great deal more of the flood affected area...
Pakistan floods
In July Pakistan was hit by massive flooding. Monsoon rainfall continues to feed the floods and the flood itself has killed tens of thousands...
