This year, the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) community received funding from The Audacious Project. Over the next five years, this funding will enable us to scale up its support for local mapping communities with the aim of mapping an area home to one billion people, adding places at high risk of natural disaster or experiencing poverty.

Over five years, HOT plan to:

• Set up a network of regional hubs in South Asia, East Africa, West Africa, and Latin America and the Caribbean, which will engage with local mapping communities, facilitate knowledge exchanges, distribute funding, and provide training and support in order to massively scale local edits to OpenStreetMap in 94 countries
• Invest in technologies that enhance mapping contributions on mobile to enable scaling of local contributions to OpenStreetMap
• Invest in map data quality and ethical collection and use of map data
• Work with humanitarian organizations, governments, and other actors to help them use OpenStreetMap to deliver more effective and efficient aid
• Work more closely with the OSM community/OpenStreetMap Foundation (OSMF), supporting the community and core systems and software

The East Africa Hub, where I will be working as the Community Manager will be located in Nairobi, Kenya, will work with OSM communities in 21 countries, in Northern, East and Southern Africa. As the new Community Manager in the E Africa hub, part of my job is to look at the status of OSM communities in these countries, to help us plan our engagement with them.

Existing OSM communities per country

These include local OSM Communities such as YouthMappers Chapters and organizations that promote and use OSM in their activities. These groups are essential in the development of OSM; they organize meetups and trainings, and encourage the use of OSM data through collaboration and engagement with government and other stakeholders. Most importantly, they contribute to OSM by adding detailed information and filling in data gaps with local knowledge and ground-truthing, as well as reaching out to and collaborating with the communities being mapped.

Microgrants

Since 2017, HOT has been supporting OSM communities with microgrants up to $7500 to run projects. Out of the 21 countries to be served by the East Africa hub, 13 have applied for microgrants, and 7 of those have received the microgrants. Through Audacious, HOT will be able to support the communities in all the 21 countries in the next 5 years.

Voting Membership

HOT voting members are people in the humanitarian OpenStreetMap community who have shown a commitment to the HOT mission, they are responsible for voting on matters affecting the organization including, but not limited to, the election of the board members. Currently, there are 15 voting members from 7 of the 21 countries that will be served by the East Africa hub. We aim to increase voting membership from African countries to have a more diverse and inclusive humanitarian OSM community.

Map Data

The level of detail in mapping differs from country to country. Looking at the number of mapped buildings in relation to the population, we see eSwatini, Lesotho as the most mapped countries, followed by Zimbabwe, Tanzania and Zambia. Most of this mapping is done remotely though, and we need to measure the level of local edits needed to scale up local contributions in OSM.

Based on these different criteria we approximate the capacity in the different countries into 3 categories: high, medium and low - which can help us determine the amount of support that will be needed and also track progress as we engage the OSM communities in these countries.

We would like to improve the methodology of assessing local communities and local mapping, and we welcome feedback and suggestions on how we could do this. Most importantly, I would love to hear from the communities in the countries we will be working with.