Greetings OSM community,

The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) adapted its governance structure last year to open seats on the Board of Directors for non-members. We are now recruiting two (2) Appointed Directors. Applications are open until April 24, 2025 — visit HOT Careers for more information and to apply.

The main reason for introducing Appointed (as opposed to solely Elected) Directors is to bring in people—and skill sets—that are not currently in abundance within our voting membership. Of course, a passion for geospatial technology and data in humanitarian, disaster, and climate response is still desirable. However, we are particularly seeking individuals with expertise in financial sustainability, diversified fundraising, and innovative hybrid business models. Ideal candidates will have a proven track record of leading impact-driven organizations through strategic growth and transformation.

As the current Secretary of the HOT Board of Directors, I’m happy to answer any questions about this opportunity. We’re excited to welcome new perspectives and strengths that complement our existing Board, which brings deep OSM/HOT history and expertise.

Best regards, =Russ

Use Russell.Deffner (at) hotosm (dot) org if you’d like to email inquiries related to this position.

Ten years ago today, I created this user profile!

Although it was not my first profile, the other one I only did a few edits before forgetting the password and a couple months later created this one. I since found that other password but instead of trying to ‘revive’ or switch-over, I chose to have the sysadmin folks delete the slightly older profile and continued on with this one. Hence, celebrating a few months late :D

However, rather than just celebrating the fact that I’ve been contributing to OSM for 10 years+, I will also use this as an opportunity to fulfill my voluntary obligations as a Voting Member of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) to summarize my contributions (since my last summary in January of 2019) and aspirations for the coming year. Over the almost 2 years now, things have changed quite dramatically. You might think ‘because of Audacious?’ or ‘because of HOT launching a fully funded Disaster Services program?’ - which yes, and yes; but much more so because I got married, had a baby and have been living on the other side of the planet (mostly due to the COVID situation) since my last update - yep, time flies when you’re having fun :)

… Vaata tervet sissekannet

2019 is starting as busy and hectic as 2018 ended, so this will be a very brief review of 2018 as a Voting Member of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) but more importantly a globally active OSM contributor.

The Big Important Stuff

• AI-Assisted Roads: Since the tail-end of 2017, I have been managing a team for HOT based in our Jakarta office that is working on the Facebook AI-Assisted Roads project. This has been an amazing project, (personally for getting to work with the team in-person for a week) but is also a great collaboration and use-case for machine learning in mapping/OSM.
• Disaster Response: In 2018, HOT activated to coordinate or support coordination for 24 disaster incidents. Our next biggest year, in terms of number of recorded responses (obviously there’s always some small incidents that we never hear about or get involved with, but local OSM-ers map so we don’t know to count those), was 2010 - the year HOT was founded - with 10 responses. This shows our ability to react quicker, have the capacity to often coordinate multiple responses at once, and that we’re doing a better job documenting responses we are involved in (and maybe that there were just a lot of disasters in 2018).
• HOT Governance: There is still a lot of work to be done, but I remain an active participant in HOT governance. Most notably in 2018, I committed to helping write the first Strategic Plan which we just finished drafting on December 28th - now it’s off to the Board and Executive Director for review and if all goes well - to membership vote during the Annual Meeting.

The Fun Stuff

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It has been a few years since I last posted what I have been up to as far as my Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) membership involvement as well as my personal contributions to OpenStreetMap (OSM). This time I thought it would be easiest to just do a brief overview by category: ## The Homefront: Forest (and other) Mapping in Colorado My goal of getting Park County, Colorado mapped continues to fall off schedule 😊 – I did get more done, just was side-tracked when a few of us started making a real push to map the forested parts of our state. Most of 2017 was focused on humanitarian mapping, so there is much more work I would still like to do locally. However, although it has been delayed on several accounts, we are so very close to starting the Denver Planimetrics import. ## Disaster Response: Activation Coordination for HOT There were lots of disasters over the last couple of years. Some notables were: Floods in Sri Lanka and Peru, a string of Earthquakes in 2016 (Indonesia, Japan, Ecuador), Hurricane Matthew, a ‘smaller’ outbreak of Ebola in the DRC and lots more that just didn’t require or garner a formal response. Two, I will expand upon…

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Greetings OpenStreetMap-pers,

This is a summary of a few key topics from the OSM-Colorado Meetup yesterday. I was really excited to have this handful of folks together; it felt more like an ‘OSM super group’ meeting than any of the meetups I have organized; reminded me of some of the early OSM-Colorado events I attended back in 2010-2011. Although I think we all had some kind of mobile device/laptop/etc. no one ‘fired anything up for show and tell’ but instead we really just had a great time hashing-out some of the major issues and opportunities around OpenStreetMap in Colorado, USA.

One of the most significant items is a wonderful opportunity to work directly with the Denver Regional Council of Governments to explore importing a huge volume of data that they have purchased and are releasing as Public Domain. We are still very much in the ‘exploratory’ stage, and have started a wiki-page. There are so many ‘side-topics’ that come up with this discussion: how to conflate with existing data, perform import(s) when/where appropriate, make it community driven, frequency that the data will be updated, how to maintain and update when there is need, and a whole lot more. Stay tuned to that page and/or the import mailing list as we begin to ramp up the effort.

We also discussed this year’s MapCamp! – Poudre Canyon. The High Park Fire in 2012 and Floods in 2013 reeked some havoc in and around Poudre Canyon, so although I have been told that some of the camping/recreation is still closed; I think it’s an even better reason to ‘head up north’ so we can do some surveying and get OSM up-to-date with the changes caused by those incidents. However, we might be looking further ‘up the canyon’ towards Cameron Pass or maybe Pingree Park area for camping. We also discussed timing and it seems like mid-August is what we are looking at (i.e. between SotM-US and SotM-International, but before it starts getting cold up high; and June seemed pretty full already for most of us).

… Vaata tervet sissekannet

Hello fellow OpenStreetMap-pers,

As a Voting member of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) we ask each other to post something about how our year went and what we want to work on in the New Year. There are currently 84 of us, so it’s nearly impossible to keep up with everyone and look for opportunities to collaborate and support one another. 2015 was an incredible year for me personally and reflecting back to my aspirations for the year, I can say that it was a success for what I had hoped to achieve for HOT, but maybe not so much accomplishing my local mapping objectives.

To continue on that note and before getting into the HOT specifics; although I did not do as much mapping in Park County, Colorado as I wanted, it was a great year of activities with OpenStreetMap-Colorado. Along with a handful of fun ‘mappy-hour/geo-beers’, a few significant things occurred; one was largely thanks to the great folks from the Geospatial Centroid at Colorado State University; and that was gaining some traction building a community around OpenStreetMap in Fort Collins. This was especially fun for me as CSU is my alma-mater and I was able to see some old friends and one of my favorite professors during a few events this year, some of us actually fought wildland fire together many moons ago.

Another significant local event was our first (annual?) OSM MapCamp! This was basically another crazy idea a few of us had thrown around for a couple years now, but I just (kind of late) decided, let’s do it! And although only 4 of us went, I actually think it was a huge success as a pilot for more ‘hands-on’ field mapping in rural parts of the US, as well as a ton of fun. I was also happy to represent HOT in a panel on Citizen Science at the Understanding Risk (UR) Boulder conference. This year I’ll continue organizing for OSM-CO but won’t make a ‘resolution’ to complete any particular mapping.

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Hello OpenStreetMappers,

I just wanted to tell everyone what a pleasure it was to fulfill the Activation Curriculum Specialist opportunity for the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) over roughly the last half-a-year. A bit of cut-paste-paraphrase from project docs: ‘The project was one of three priorities the community selected to fulfill a grant awarded by the Hewlett Foundation in order to improve HOT’s ability to achieve its mission, inspired by the response of the community during the West Africa Ebola Epidemic.’ What is always most special to me is meeting and working with other OSM/HOT enthusiasts – especially in person. One aspect of the Activation Curriculum project that was not certain in the beginning was that it would include leading workshops on three continents; I could not be more honored to have had this experience.

The project launched in late April with the ‘Activation Curriculum Sprint’; a 3 day workshop in Washington D.C. attended by 8 core HOT community members. These were also the 3 days prior to the first HOT Summit; somewhere between then and State of the Map – New York I lost track of exactly how many HOT voting members, board, staff and of course the 100s of other HOT/OSM community members and partners I was able to meet in person. The summer then seemed to just disappear; I had a few fun outings, including OSMCO MapCamp! but it was mostly just sleeves up working on the project. In the end we produced the HOT Activation Protocol and Training Center to organize and most importantly, start providing training to those volunteers who coordinate Disaster Mapping for HOT.

… Vaata tervet sissekannet

In follow-up to my last post: HOT 2014 Review, here is a brief post regarding my aspirations for 2015. Most of which are related to my Voting Membership in the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, but some are mostly personal goals.

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Greetings, this is a brief recap of my contributions to the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) in 2014.

In February 2014 I was nominated and accepted as a Voting Member of HOT and in March I was elected as the Chairperson for the Voting Members.

At the end of March, as some of you well know, we began an Activation to assist Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), aka Doctors Without Borders, with the Ebola crisis in West Africa, see osm.wiki/wiki/2014_West_Africa_Ebola_Response for details. I assisted the Activation Coordinators at the beginning of the Activation by updating that wiki page for about the first month, as well as completing a handful of mapping tasks. I also remotely contributed to the Map Lesotho Mapathon in July.

As Chairperson, my focus was less on the mapping, and more on the ‘behind-the-scenes’ operations of HOT. I attempted to assemble the Voting Members for an ‘annual meeting’ twice, but was unable to get a quorum (at the time a majority) of our members. This was obviously a problem and after many meetings and conversations it became fairly clear that with a worldwide membership, even meeting electronically, would be difficult.

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Just a quick note while changing planes in Seattle…

I’m so honored and excited to have been selected to join Severin Menard in Mongolia. Severin has been in UlaanBaatar setting things up and Monday we’ll begin teaching and coordinating OSM mapping in UB. Stay tuned to the HOT network for more…

Happy Mapping, =Russ

Russell.Deffner@hotosm.org

I hadn’t been planning a complete armchair-micro-mapping-makeover of Colorado State University, but it was one of those things, it began by surfing the map/data in Colorado ‘hunting’ newbies (just to say hello and invite them to OSM-Colorado - and found myself admiring the good work done by our rival Buffaloes (CU) on mapping the Boulder campus(es); well I decided I’m gonna do you one better…

So, with love (it’s a friendly rivalry – I have Buff family), I think I’ve now put CSU on the map (better). Of course you’re free to have your own opinions, but could this be the ‘best’ mapped campus in the US? You’re also free to leave me comments, I’d gladly view other well mapped campuses; here is the general location of CSU on OSM

Some details in case folks are interested in some of the ‘stranger’ things in my micro-mapping style.

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It’s been a fairly good weekend; my side of the divide has received some actual soaking rains (of course scattered/typical CO afternoon ‘monsoons’ also with hail and lightning) for several days now. Although it’s not quite the same story on the western slope and the call for mapping continues; see osm.wiki/wiki/2013_Colorado_Wildfire_Season

I also hit 1000 edits today, or what I think should more accurately be called/is changesets; I think a better milestone is having edited 500K nodes (which I’m around 350). Anyway, I digress…

Just wanted to chart a few things:

• I still have on the agenda, a quick recap of SOTM-US (and the follow-up in Denver); maybe just another diary entry.

• Now that I’ve pretty much done all I can to help HOT create the Guide and Code, I starting helping the Activation working group, first by attending the meeting the other day; and of course I volunteered to help do something; so I’ll be working with Andrew Buck on humanitarian mapping project (HMP) ‘templates’ (as HMP’s basically have to come first), hopefully we’ll have something in a few weeks; ready to deploy by basically anyone (more to come).

• And because I finally think I can relax a bit on the CO fire mapping situation, I can start working on documenting it. I’m not quite sure what medium I want to use, but expect it to be pretty directly pro OSM/HOT; but professional (maybe a bit salesman-ish) and most importantly, hopefully it will help gain interest in OSM for emergency use (obv. with a wildfire lean).

Got the immediate area around the Bluebell Fire burning near Brook Forest (Evergreen), Colorado pretty well mapped. Also sounds like firefighters have a good feeling they’ll get this one contained quickly.

For those of you in Colorado, or passing through, or just interested; our local community is fantastic! No doubt there was a bit of momentum loss when the Coast’s moved to the PNW, and I was totally swamped last summer with our terrible fire season; but we managed to keep rumbling along. JimmyRocks moving here gave a nice boost and we had a great group show up for the Spring Editathon, quite a few new faces have begun to appear including folks from the NPS - can’t wait to hear Mamata’s talk at SOTM-US - I hope they’re contemplating our idea of mapping parties at national parks - let us in free and we’ll map ;) - and all the sudden it seems we’ve got all these great ideas for meetups beyond the norm; we’re going to have a SOTM-Denver (basically a recap for those who can’t make it to San Fran) and what I’m really excited about, a Map/Camp-ing party later in the summer/fall. Oh, and it was a small but awesome meetup last weekend; the first event with the Coast’s back in town, welcome home Hurricane!

We’d love to see more faces, so don’t hesitate to join or even if you just want to see what we’re up to, visit: http://www.meetup.com/OSM-Colorado/

Cheers - hope to see/meet you at SOTM-US or a Colorado mapping event, =Russ

P.S. Any Utah folks want to help plan a (probably very future) Moab Map/Camp-ing party? I love that place and it’s been too long since I visited.

Hey all, I’m still in Bailey but ‘moved’ (at least my user profile) towards the middle of Park County. Starting getting in the thick of the TIGER mess toward the southern edge of the county and wanted to see if any folks are located down that way. Even referencing the TIGER 2012 data, there is no way to be 100% sure on street names, etc. without local knowledge.

So, after messing around mapping Uganda I was inspired to try and make the area around home as close to 100% mapped as possible. Not necessarily addresses, etc. but 100% land-cover (not zoning/administrative) but looking at imagery and creating a ‘raw’ “this is what is on the ground” map. I started with simple/small polygons for ‘heavily’ forested areas basically coming off the administrative boundary for Pike National Forest, but that didn’t really work the way I imagined and also would have been extremely tedious, so I started over with a larger polygon delineated by 285, 126 and the South Platte River - made this landuse=forest and then used relations to ‘insert’ meadows, rocks, etc. I tried doing a complex relationship where the aforementioned forest was the outer polygon with residential as an inner polygon hoping to make forest/meadow/etc. inside the residential areas part of the outer polygon - didn’t work, not sure why; seemed a multi-multi-polygon relationship isn’t behaving intuitively. Anyway, just finished up Burland, so please feel free to check it out and give me feedback.

So as an American Red Cross Volunteer, I got word of the collaborative project between H.O.T., ARC, and Uganda Red Cross. I’ve known about H.O.T. for sometime and figured it was a sign that I should pitch in. This project is another amazing example of their work and I’m glad to see the Red Cross helping out. I also learned to be very appreciative of the imagery in the U.S.

Great work H.O.T. I signed up for the mailing list and will try to pitch in more often.

I hope those of you I just friended on OSM find this entry. User XenonofArcticus and I are working on getting a Jefferson and Park County (and surrounded area) group together. I noticed a lot of users in the area (I friended everyone within 20KM or so) have not yet made any edits or have not in a long time. We are hoping to do a basic OSM overview and editing class in the near future. Please follow this discussion on Pinecam.com for details: http://www.pinecam.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=155214&start=12&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=

1. Have about 1/2 of Park County TIGER edits complete.
2. Have been using OSM for situational maps for a high profile Non-profit organization involved in disaster response; in conjunction I (and other volunteers) have been actively engaging in editing areas in and surrounding the 2012 wildfires in Colorado.
3. Contacted by XenonofArcticus via OSM and started working on building a Park/Jeffco area OSM group using pinecam.com.

I like the piste map concept and since I missed the Winter Park meet-up/mapping party I thought I'd contribute some knowledge from my years working at Copper Mountain. Enjoy