HOT OSM Needs Some Hands to Digitize Refugee Camps from Imagery

A unit at the State Deptarment has been working with the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) to explore the use of OSM and its community in times of crisis. This week there's a proof of concept exercise mapping refugee camps in the Horn of Africa.

How to help: We are going to open access to the imagery on Monday 21 May 2012. We would like to spend two 24-hour periods tracing the areas of interest, which will include 11 refugee sites. All work will be done through the HOT Tasking Manager (http://tasks.hotosm.org), a microtasking platform that will split up the image tracing into ‘tiles’ that will require approximately 30-45 minutes to map.

Accomplishing this task will require that volunteers become familiar with OpenStreetMapand the basic concepts of mapping. But, don’t worry, there are plenty of resources out there to help. For more information on the OpenStreetMap (OSM) process, see the “Beginning OpenStreetMap Tutorial” available from the LearnOSM website (http://learnOSM.org), specifically Chapters 1,2,3,6. For more information on HOT’s work in Somalia see the HOT Somalia project page, and other HOT related materials on the HOT wiki.

- Disruptive Geo Blog via @disruptivegeo