Versión en español

This is a follow-up of my previous post presenting the research work.

At Humanitarian OpenStreeMap Team (HOT) we want to better use our resources to support the wider Humanitarian Open Mapping movement. That’s why we are running a research project to understand how to support contributors and communities in countries with humanitarian, disaster or development needs.

In this post I’ll summarize what happened in the first quarter (Q1) of 2021, what we learned and the plan for the next 3 months (Q2).

Our goal and key results for Q1 were:

Foundational work for the research with focus on global/shared needs is kick-started

• Stakeholders are aligned on scope of the work
• A set of prioritized core/global questions and unknowns is delivered
• Initial exploration of potential data sources is delivered
• A plan for Q2 is shaped by the insights and learnings gathered

You can see more details on on the public project brief.

Q1: Focus on global questions

We decided to focus first on discovering questions and unknowns that we defined as “core/global”, which affect the wider global humanitarian open mapping movement. As a result we end up with with a list of buckets (or categories) and a list of questions we think we need to understand, we acknowledge we’ll have to reduce the scope of the questions to make it feasible.

• Who: Questions about the people present in the communities, their connections and organization.
• Activity: Questions about contributions and their types.
• Where: About location, languages, tools, channels and platforms.
• Motivation and retention: About incentives, satisfaction and barriers.
• Impact: About data and impact perception.
• Inclusive and welcoming: Understanding how safe people feel, their diversity or conflict resolution.

One important thing we did here, was to differentiate between more general questions about the communities and groups (community-level) and question at a more individual level (contributor-level)

One of the brainstorming exercises we ran to come up with what we needed to understand

We also tried to understand if there were potential existing sources of data that can help us answer some of these questions in the future or if there were none and we’ll have to create new data ourselves.

Learnings

After all of this work we reflected on the requirements to move to a new phase to gather the data or create it if missing.

It was clear at this time that this work will require deep collaboration with communities and that this was not possible with HOT’s current engagement levels or relationships with communities in certain areas and regions.

This changed our vision for the next steps, realizing that in order for this research to have its intended impact we needed to improve our relationship building and management first.

Miriam Gonzalez, HOT’s board president

Q2: Focus on building stronger relationships

For Q2, we have iterated our project plan to provide room for the relationship building piece. Our intentions for this quarter are:

• Focus on establishing a strong internal relationship building process with communities and contributors and start (or continue) building key relationships in East Africa and Asia and the Pacific.
• Tackle the community-level questions first, in collaboration with key community contacts in these regions.
• Co-create with communities an optimized plan for engaging local contributors on the contributor-level questions later on.

We want to make sure that we don’t run a research without having an excellent capacity to reach everyone that wants to be heard, and that’s why we think communities need to be involved in defining this process, even if it takes longer than we initially planned.

How to be involved in this work

The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team will try to reach out to communities and contributors in the next weeks to build better relationships, and later check on the current plan and questions.

You can also join the Community Working Group via our chat rooms on Slack, Matrix or Telegram (all bridged), contact via communityteam at hotosm.org or comment directly to this post.

• What do you think about the plan?
• Are the questions and buckets/categories important enough?
• Are there existing data sources we haven’t thought about?
• Are we missing something?
• How do you see this project helping your work or your communities?
• Do you have other suggestions on how to get contributors and communities involved?

Thanks!