HOT receives core funding to bring 1 billion people to the map
By Mikel Maron
It’s just been announced that the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) has received core funding from The Audacious Project to help grow OpenStreetMap communities around the world. Over the next five years, the goal is to put 1 billion people on the map, assisting people most vulnerable to disaster and poverty to map their communities. This core support will fundamentally shift and scale how HOT operates, directly helping local mapping communities where maps are most needed.
It’s amazing to look back at HOT’s roots. Fifteen years ago I planted the seed that would grow to become the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team. Back then, OpenStreetMap was itself only a year old, based on the (yes, audacious!) idea that people could collectively work together to map the world. Considering how out-there OpenStreetMap felt in 2005, the idea that we could apply OpenStreetMap to aid humanitarian response must have seemed totally unreal. Yet, driven by passion and relentless learning and experimentation, just five years later HOT helped OSM become the base map of Haiti to aid the response to the 2010 earthquake. Tens of thousands have helped to get to today, in big ways and small, making OpenStreetMap critical infrastructure to help our world.
Mapbox has been there all along this journey. In 2009, I met the team that would become Mapbox at the Camp Roberts experiments, as they prepared to monitor the Afghanistan elections for fraud. Together, we developed the technical processes that supported the Haiti mapping response. Saman, who today helps build Mapbox Studio, designed the stunning HOT logo. The Mapbox Data Team rallied us together to map Nepal after its devastating earthquake in 2015. Now and into this exciting new phase of growth, Mapbox is committed to bringing our data, tools, imagery and people to support the work of HOT.
The next five years are going to be intense. Our world is a world of crisis — crisis in our health, our justice, and our climate. Equipping people everywhere, in every community, with data and the tools to use them, is a critical piece in how we can collectively understand and respond to these challenges.
We’re excited to support HOT in this next phase, and all OpenStreetMap efforts. Contact us at the Community Team if there’s any way we can help.
Maps feature data from Mapbox and OpenStreetMap and their data partners.
