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News — 13 April, 2022

HOT Summit: an Exciting New Approach for 2022 and 2023

We want to improve how we bring communities, partners, and supporters together around open mapping, OpenStreetMap, and humanitarian response / social impact through the HOT Summit.

The last two HOT Summits were online, due to Covid, and this has given us the chance to reflect on how to do this. In the next 12 months, we will not hold a central HOT Summit, but instead will invest the time, money and other resources in supporting and collaborating on a range of community events, bringing the spirit of the Summit to multiple new places and hundreds of new people! In 2023, we will aim to co-host a full, in-person (or hybrid) HOT Summit with a community event in one of HOT’s priority countries.

Summary

  • We want to improve how we bring communities, partners and supporters together around open mapping, OpenStreetMap and humanitarian response / social impact through the HOT Summit

  • The last two HOT Summits were online, due to covid, and this has given us the chance to reflect on how to do this

  • Over the next two years, HOT will experiment with two different approaches to the HOT Summit.

  • In the next 12 months, we will not hold a central HOT Summit, but instead will invest the time, money and other resources in supporting and collaborating on a range of community events, bringing the spirit of the Summit to multiple new places and hundreds of new people!

  • In 2023, we will co-host a full, in-person HOT Summit with a community event in one of HOT’s priority countries.

Long Version

The purpose of the HOT Summit has always been to bring together communities, partners, collaborators and supporters, committed to and active in humanitarian open mapping to learn, share and connect. The event has brought together 100s if not 1000s of people and has been a rich and fertile ground for building capacity, sharing knowledge, strengthening networks and launching collaborations and initiatives around humanitarian work, social impact, OSM and open mapping.

The Covid pandemic meant that, for two years, we adapted to an online event. We know that this has its disadvantages, especially in building strong networks and relationships, but it was also an opportunity; to see how a digital Summit could work, and to provide space to think about how the Summit can continue to deliver effectively on its purpose.

Since the first HOT Summit in 2015, the humanitarian open mapping landscape (and the communities, NGOs, institutions, government entities, tech collectives, etc that care about it) has evolved and proliferated massively, and this is a wonderful thing.

As a consequence of the above, the HOT Summit working group (a mix of HOT staff and community volunteers) is excited to present a new approach for the Summit for 2022 and 2023.

  1. For this period, we will focus only on priority country locations for the HOT Summit as our hypothesis (based on previous experiences, but especially on the 2018 Summit in Dar-es-Salaam) is that an event in the regions where we are active and want to support impact through OpenStreetMap better serves communities and partners in those regions and maximizes access and value for people living there.

  2. We want to use the Summit as a way of supporting other events and communities, so we are contributing value across a network, rather than centralizing it in one place.

  3. Over the next 12 months, we will experiment with a completely new approach where we will not actually organize a HOT Summit event as we know it, but instead develop a program of collaborations and partnerships with communities, organizations and networks who are planning events where we can bring, or strengthen, a focus on humanitarian open mapping and OpenStreetMap for social impact. Our hypothesis is that, through this distributed, networked approach, we can bring the spirit and impact of the HOT Summit to new places and audiences and support the growth of the open humanitarian open mapping movement regionally, at the same time as investing in and developing impactful collaborations with a wide variety of communities and organizations at a national, regional and international level.

  4. Next year, in 2023, we plan to organize and resource a full in-person (or hybrid) HOT Summit event in close collaboration with an existing and relevant community event in one of HOT’s priority countries, building on the success of the 2018 Dar-es-Salaam model. Our hypothesis is that, through a co-hosting model with a community event in a priority country, we can have a greater impact.

Our goal is to work out how the efforts of the Summit Working Group, the resources from HOT and the people who generously sponsor the event and the commitment and time of all those people who make the event so rich and vibrant, can be best channeled to continue to deliver on the HOT Summit’s purpose.

As we go through this period of experimentation and develop these concepts, we plan to engage deeply and communicate regularly on opportunities, developments and news with all those who want to participate and support. To receive updates directly to your inbox, please sign up for the HOT Summit mailing list or stay tuned on social media.

How can you participate?

Firstly, if you know of events that might align with HOT’s mission and who would be open for collaboration or support, please let us know via summit@hotosm.org. We are particularly interested in events in priority countries but open to all good suggestions!

Secondly, if you want to get involved in the work of delivering on this ambitious approach, you could consider joining the HOT Summit Working Group (which will remain the engine of the HOT Summit and will be central to all design, coordination and delivery aspects).

Lastly, if you have comments, questions or suggestions, we want to hear from you! There is a thread open on the Community Working Group forum where you can post and discuss. Alternatively, if you would like to provide anonymous or private feedback, you are always welcome to use the feedback form on the HOT website (for anything, not just feedback on the HOT Summit).

Thanks for reading all the way to the bottom of this post! We hope that you are as excited about this approach as we are!