Hi all,

Here’s my response to the question listed on wiki page for the board election. osm.wiki/Humanitarian_OSM_Team/Board_Elections_2021
Please feel free to comment or message/mail me, talk to you soon!

By Arnalie Vicario
Q1. What is/are the impact/s of the shift from global to regional structure of HOT on voting members?
A1. Strengthen the regional/local community is good in many ways including reducing the language barrier and harmonizing the open culture to local. Voting member is usually the opinion leader of local/regional community. As a result, about the impact of the shift from global to regional structure, it could be good to HOT.

Q2. Conversely, how do you think the voting members should interact (e.g. what is their role) with the Regional Hubs?
A2. Regional hubs can assist the voting members and the local communities to work more aligned to the vision/mission of HOT. The active voting members may talk with regional hubs more often for the harmonization of local/personal interests and HOT objectives.

By Matt Gibb
Q3. How can we support HOT volunteers who may experience burnout as we work towards HOT’s Audacious goals (including Voting Member and non-Voting Member volunteers), while the number of HOT paid staff grows?
A3. Burnout in community happens, so the responsibility of paid staff is getting heavier. We should facilitate more communications so we “speak out before burnout”. We also could take turns (flying geese paradigm) to be responsible for the tasks towards HOT’s audacious goals that potentially burnout community members.

By Heather Leson
Q4. What are the most important things the HOT board should be doing for the 1. membership 2. board 3. staff 4. global OSM community?
A4. (1) to facilitate the friendly (in many ways) environment for our community members. (2) be the plus to the operation of HOT. (3) share the experience and expertise. (4) be more influential in global community.

… See full entry

Hi Community,

It’s Kuo-Yu slayer Chuang from GeoThings, Taiwan. I am now working with a group of ICT specialist/developer. As a team, we sit in the middle of voluntary communities, government agencies, and NGOs (humanitarian organization or standardization organization), for the development of something called “Humanitarian ICT”.

We worked with OSM/HOT Mappers, where we see the power of volunteered geographic information. We worked with Crisis Mappers, where we see the energy of crowdsourcing. We worked as the assistant staff of central/local government, where we learned the work flow in response to disaster in different countries. We worked as the voluntary member of NGO, where we saw the needs of ICT tools to ease the complexity of handling paper works during emergency.

We also co-work with Asian Development Bank on OSM mapping, environment survey, and crisis mapping with the ICT tools for the capacity building to disaster resilience in some Asian countries. We found most of those stakeholders, responsible to disaster preparedness/response/relief, need the detailed basemap plus crowdsourced information for knowing the situation and response. With the detail tagged OSM data by community that including level, material, even the visual condition, warning and evacuation can be performed earlier, and that is just critical for emergency response. That’s the reason why we think HOT is essential, is important. This also made us feel like to contribute to HOT, even we are just some random ICT Geeks :-p

… See full entry