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…

• Cyclone Winston: Although we did not elevate this to a full Activation, many of us spent a lot of time mapping Fiji. This is where we discovered the ‘cane train’ and how that tiny gauged rail is so hard to see. I felt it was a lot of great island mapping and now a large portion of Fiji has good road network and buildings (ie. Basemap for response).
• Fall 2017 Disaster Response: If you could say there was a ‘highlight’ in HOT disaster response over these two years; this is it. For a while, I think it was literally a new disaster declaration every week. But somehow, we just kept taking them on and managing them well, given the circumstance. Working directly with FEMA for the Puerto Rico response and being that bridge between the local OSM community and response organizations is exactly what we prepare for and was successful with this response. Of course, we wanted to be able to provide more and get OSM into more people’s ‘toolkit’ but we at least got into the conversation and continue working with U.S. response organizations to further solidify the usefulness of crowd-sourcing in emergency response and recovery.

Community Building: The Wildest Places on Earth

• Colorado & Wyoming: After some initial success having mapathons with the University of Wyoming, we went ahead and started a meet-up as part of our current OSM-Colorado plan. It hasn’t been very successful (yet), but WY is the least populated state in the U.S. so I think patience is key on growing that community. I hope (a) highly motivated individual(s) in Laramie or Cheyenne show some interest in hosting events or we’ll just keep trying to do one or two a year. There was a lot of action around Colorado meetups, I made some connections with OSM/Maptime Western Slope and started being more involved with the Maptime Boulder and MileHigh groups. I think Colorado is starting to get some very sustainable traction as a ‘micro community’ in the U.S.
• Mongolia Connection: Most important to me was meeting Tunga from the Ger Community Mapping Center (GCMC) when she gave a presentation at Colorado State University in 2016. About a year later, I started helping one of their volunteers – based in Denver – organize mapathons as part of the GCMC’s microgrant program awarded by HOT. It is a very neat circle to be helping Mongolians promote OSM in Colorado after going to promote and teach OSM in Mongolia in 2013. And there’s the whole sister city relation with Ulaanbaatar and Denver, etc. I’m so happy this connection is continuing to promote community in and in-between our mappers.

Project Work: How I Paid the Bills

• School Safety Maps: While I had some downtime from HOT project work in 2016, I was privileged to help ERCM Consultants with designing some emergency response/campus safety maps for a school near Washington D.C. This is in relation to some non-mapping related consulting I did for The “I love U Guys” Foundation who design and publish (for free) school (and other facilities) emergency response and recovery protocols.
• End Malaria: In late 2016 I was selected to manage the Malaria Elimination campaign for HOT. This was a multi-partnership collaboration to map all buildings in a roughly 600,000 square kilometers area spread over 9 countries using a variety of tools like Tomnod, Mapswipe and large-scale validation techniques. This work has led to a continued partnership with several of the organizations and HOT will most likely continue to work on the eradication of Malaria until it is gone.
• Indonesia Roads: There was not much of a gap between finishing up the final reports on my malaria contracts to starting on a new project. In late 2017 I was selected to manage the project to complete the road network in Indonesia. This has been great for me as some of the same mappers that were on our global team for malaria elimination are part of this project as well. It helps show our commitment to the map of Indonesia but also shows how much work it takes to truly complete the basemap of a country.

Events: Where I have Been

• State of the Map Seattle July 2016: I’ll just say this may forever be one of my personal all time favorite conferences. Did get a scholarship so stayed in the dorms which may have added to the experience, but overall just had a great time.
• HOT Summit and State of the Map Brussels September 2016: These I went on my own dime; really enjoyed Brussels and there was a great turnout of HOT friends with the Summit attached.
• Missing Maps Gathering and HOT Summit September 2017: Last year we did the Summit ‘solo’ from another larger conference. The days before I was one of the HOT ‘delegation’ for the Missing Maps gathering which was a great work session and felt we came away with a better vision for the collaboration. The Summit itself was amazing and I would say is maybe my second favorite conference experience.
• GIS In The Rockies September 2017: I thought about going the whole time, but in the end was too busy and just did our JOSM training workshop. We plan on doing it again this year but probably a longer session with a small fee going to help pay for OSM-CO/WY meetup.
• State of the Map Boulder October 2017: Of course I was going to be at State of the Map Boulder. This was a great boost to our local community and think much of the action we are seeing in the meetup groups, etc. directly stems from the OSM energy at SotM-US.