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From Crowdsourced Mapping to Community Mapping: The Post-earthquake Work of OpenStreetMap Haiti

  • Robert SodenEmail author
  • Leysia Palen
Conference paper
First Online:

Abstract

The earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12, 2010 catalyzed a nascent set of efforts in then-emergent “volunteer technology communities.” Among these was the response from OpenStreetMap, a volunteer-driven project that makes geospatial data free and openly available. Following the earthquake, remotely located volunteers rapidly mapped the affected areas to support the aid effort in a remarkable display of crowdsourced work. However, some within that effort believed that the impact and import of open and collaborative mapping techniques could provide much richer value to humanitarian aid work and the long-term development needs of the country. They launched an ambitious project that trialed methods for how to create sustainable and locally-owned community-mapping ecosystems in at-risk regions of the world. This paper describes how an organization that emerged out of the response—the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team—formalized their practices in relation to many different stakeholder needs with the aim for setting a model for how the potential of participatory, community mapping could be realized in Haiti and beyond.

Keywords

Geospatial Data Humanitarian Work Entrepreneurial Effort Internally Displace Person Haiti Earthquake 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Copyright information

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.University of Colorado BoulderBoulderUSA

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