Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team’s Data Quality Internship 2021 was a twelve week programme. An opportunity to become deeply involved within the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team and community while gaining readily transferable geospatial skills.

The interns focused on validating priority disaster response projects, projects with imminent field mapping and also on tackling the backlog of un-validated HOT projects. In total, they validated 74 projects across 12 countries, See here

The interns were led through a series of webinars hosted by a range of professionals in the humanitarian mapping sector. Meta, Kontur, Mapbox and OSGeo ran skill sharing sessions for the interns - this involved training the interns how to use tools which the organizations had created, for example Disaster Ninja, OSGeo Live and RapiD. This broadened the interns knowledge of geospatial tools and enhanced their ability to validate.

In addition several key individuals in the geospatial sector participated in Ask Me Anything sessions, where the interns heard about their inspiring geospatial career paths and had the chance to ask insightful questions

Interns also received live training in a wide range of geospatial tools culminating in their ability to confidently validate the work of other mappers.

Some of the training sessions were recorded, please view this playlist to see all of these in order. Of particular interest might be:

• If you’ve never used QGIS before but are keen to learn, here is how to setup and use QGIS to create maps from scratch in this two part series Episode 1, Episode 2
• If you’re already into validation but want to learn about the mysterious art of “3rd pass validation” check this video.

Highlights

Group photo of the interns