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

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COOP 2014 - Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems, 27-30 May 2014, Nice (France)

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.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA

    Robert Soden & Leysia Palen

Authors
  1. Robert Soden
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  2. Leysia Palen
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Correspondence to Robert Soden .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University, Kista, Sweden

    Chiara Rossitto

  2. Sheffield Hallam University C3RI, Sheffield, United Kingdom

    Luigina Ciolfi

  3. Xerox Research Centre Europe, Meylan, France

    David Martin

  4. Sociology and Ethnology, Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis, Nice, France

    Bernard Conein

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Soden, R., Palen, L. (2014). From Crowdsourced Mapping to Community Mapping: The Post-earthquake Work of OpenStreetMap Haiti. In: Rossitto, C., Ciolfi, L., Martin, D., Conein, B. (eds) COOP 2014 - Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems, 27-30 May 2014, Nice (France). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06498-7_19

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06498-7_19

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-06497-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-06498-7

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