Hi, I’m Rupert Allan, and am fascinated with how people engage with - and belong in - their surroundings. As a spatial designer, I have conceived and realised movie designs and humanitarian interventions. I helped devise the ‘Motorcycle Mapping’ concept of Open Mapping for Emergency and Development contexts.

My OSM Philosophy: OpenStreetMap: OpenStreetMap is the ‘wiki-map’ which is jointly-owned by the people of the world. It depends on the digital revolution to empower people within their own communities to take control of how they are represented, mapped, and seen by the outside world. The project finds its heart not in the technology or tools it uses, or commercially interested organisations backing it, but in the Open Street Map itself, the publicly owned wiki-style platform, accessible to anyone via Smartphone or Computer, to edit, use or develop.

It is a transparent, cost-neutral project by which donors can engage and collaborate with their field counterparts, giving time rather than money to support the production of commonly owned visualisations from satellite and field data. This enables the delivery of humanitarian assistance in the form of engineering, medical, and cultural intervention, in areas generally considered ‘inaccessible’ and ‘precarious’.

Potentially, it changes everything.