Update: Michele Tobias is unable to attend - this session is cancelled.
When a natural disaster or humanitarian crisis strikes, maps are critical for relief efforts but much of the modern world has yet to be mapped. Typically rural and low-income places are missing in common digital map data sets like Google Maps, Bing Maps, or Openstreetmap, making it difficult to direct aid. How can you help a person whose house was leveled by a hurricane if you didn’t know there was a house there in the first place? How can you educate nearby villages about Ebola prevention in a region with an outbreak if you don’t know there’s a village nearby? Openstreetmap Mapathons aim to fill these knowledge gaps in support of humanitarian efforts and UC libraries are an ideal place to implement them. Openstreetmap is an open source, community contributed dataset of transportation and infrastructure. Openstreetmap provides easy to follow training materials and a mapping interface so that beginners with no previous GIS experience can begin to contribute new data in about a half an hour. Humanitarian Openstreetmap provides a task manager with pre-defined projects that contribute directly to humanitarian relief efforts. In this talk, I’ll discuss how I and colleagues have used existing training materials and online tools to implement quarterly Openstreetmap Mapathons in the UC Davis Library as a part of our #maptimeDavis geospatial skills workshop series.
