News

As we enter our second week in Mbale, we've started surveying the surrounding districts of Sironko, Manafwu and Baduda today (Monday, January 18th). These...

The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team is pleased to welcome eighteen new voting members!

The Mapping Financial Inclusion in Uganda project is truly underway as we enter our second week of training in Mbale, Uganda. HOT is currently at the Uganda Christian University (UCU) introducing 30 local students to various open source tools with the assistance of students from Makerere University. There will be two days of training before we head out into the field on Wednesday to start mapping the district of Mbale.

There is no map for the 42 bus lines in Metropolitan Managua, capital of Nicaragua, where 80% of the 2 million inhabitants that are dependent on buses to commute to work or school. But engaged citizens used Free Technology and the power of collaboration to create the first digital public transportation map.

As we near the end of the year, there’s many stories that stand out and define the past year. One that I’d like to highlight here is a positive one - the continuation of the sharp decline of absolute poverty over the past year.One of the factors that’s shown to contribute to raising people’s standards of living, especially for those living on next to nothing, is financial inclusion. And one of the success stories here is the rise of mobile money - at number 5 in the Gates Foundation list of Good News stories for 2015: “Mobile Banking Exceeds Our Optimistic Projections”.The mobile money sector in countries like Uganda is growing at an enormous pace, processing over 500 million transactions in 2015, with many more people using mobile money than a traditional bank account - and these services only came into existence six years ago!With the HOT project on “Mapping Financial Services” in Uganda (more background on the CGAP blog here), we’ll be updating, opening up and increasing access to data on financial services, and specifically mobile money services, for Uganda. With only a short time to go until we start our field survey on January 5th, the project team is working hard to finalize our training curriculum, logistics and mapping process.

HOT Indonesia has been working with Australian Government since March 2011. Initially the pilot project focus on the use of OpenStreetMap (OSM) data as...

The Humanitarian Innovation Fund recently published HOT's latest OpenAerialMap blog post written by Cristiano Giovando: http://www.elrha.org/hif-blog/openaerialmap-final-blog/  

Every year during the rainy season, the largest city in Tanzania, Dar es Salaam, suffers from devastating floods that wipe out roads, destroy houses, and result in deaths, sickness, and millions of dollars worth of damages. By helping communities to map their wards, the Ramani Huria project is able to support disaster prevention and response to areas that were previously off the map, literally. One key element of these maps is drainage systems. We have dedicated mappers working to ensure these, as well as wetland zones and flood-prone areas, are included accurately in our maps.

Inspired by our response to the West Africa Ebola epidemic, a grant was generously made by the Hewlett Foundation to HOT in late 2014. This funding was aimed at improving the ability of HOT to fulfill its large scale and long running Ebola response, as well as have the capacity to respond to future events. It was determined by the community that the grant be divided and focus on three projects, addressing the development of the online tools Field Papers and the Export Tool, as well as building the numbers of Activation Coordinators.

The buzz of Geography Awareness Week, has reached far corners of the world. This year’s theme “Explore! The Power of Maps” has inspired more than 60 groups to join HOT and the Missing Maps partners during November 15 – 21 in support of Geography Awareness Week.

https://donate.hotosm.org You can make the difference in helping HOT meet it's fundraising target for 2015 and raise $50,000 in the next 50 days. Mapbox...

  As the new Export Tool has been successfully rolled out, the earlier version is to be switched off as it is held on the GeoFabrik...

Since the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) officially activated on the 27th October, the team has been working hard to evaluate the mapping needs in response to the Eastern Afghanistan earthquake. There are two Tasking Manager projects set up in an effort to map key affected areas.