A season for giving
Fellow Nestofarians,
2011 has been a difficult year for most developed economies, and the only certainty 2012 offers is more uncertainty. It's easy in such times to get overwhelmed and lose the bigger picture. The holiday season is a good chance to break the every day schedule and instead reflect on how lucky we all are. In this spirit, this year, rather than sending our clients and partners Christmas gifts, we've instead donated on their behalf to a project we believe has the potential to improve the lives of millions: the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT).
Diligent Nestoria followers will know that we've been long-time supporters of OpenStreetMap, but you might not know of the great work HOT has been doing. The project focuses on getting the humanitarian and open mapping communities to work together in two ways.
Firstly, many parts of the world don't have easy to use (ie digitally shareable), accurate maps, or the existing maps are out of date due to natural disasters. HOT helps coordinate efforts to rapidly focus volunteer mappers to address this need - both via fieldwork with GPS devices, but also from across the world using satellite imagery - after a disaster. A great example of the effectiveness of a global community of volunteer mappers diving in to help is this visualization made by ItoWorld of the response to the Haiti Earthquake a few years ago.
What's so inspiring about this is that it lets people 1000's of miles away from the disaster immediately and tangibly work to help improve the situation on the ground.
Secondly HOT works to stimulate open mapping via advocacy, training and outreach literally across the world. Here's a great presentation about some of the training work HOT has undertaken in Indonesia.
This very week HOT has been activated to help map health facilities in Libya.
We're proud to be able to support HOT and their mission. If this post has inspired you please get involved with HOT, more help is always needed. It can be as simple spending a few hours tracing satellite imagery. HOT operates a task server with a list of projects that need help. Please get involved. Hopefully we've interested you enough to follow HOT's progress via their twitter feed. If you're in London, we're hoping to have someone from HOT present at one of our upcoming #geomob events.
In closing, happy holidays from all of us to all of you. We're looking forward to a great 2012 (That being said though 2011 isn't over just yet - we'll have some more OpenStreetMap related news to share in a few days time).
