Hello OpenStreetMappers,

I just wanted to tell everyone what a pleasure it was to fulfill the Activation Curriculum Specialist opportunity for the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) over roughly the last half-a-year. A bit of cut-paste-paraphrase from project docs: ‘The project was one of three priorities the community selected to fulfill a grant awarded by the Hewlett Foundation in order to improve HOT’s ability to achieve its mission, inspired by the response of the community during the West Africa Ebola Epidemic.’ What is always most special to me is meeting and working with other OSM/HOT enthusiasts – especially in person. One aspect of the Activation Curriculum project that was not certain in the beginning was that it would include leading workshops on three continents; I could not be more honored to have had this experience.

The project launched in late April with the ‘Activation Curriculum Sprint’; a 3 day workshop in Washington D.C. attended by 8 core HOT community members. These were also the 3 days prior to the first HOT Summit; somewhere between then and State of the Map – New York I lost track of exactly how many HOT voting members, board, staff and of course the 100s of other HOT/OSM community members and partners I was able to meet in person. The summer then seemed to just disappear; I had a few fun outings, including OSMCO MapCamp! but it was mostly just sleeves up working on the project. In the end we produced the HOT Activation Protocol and Training Center to organize and most importantly, start providing training to those volunteers who coordinate Disaster Mapping for HOT.

Again, what is more exciting to me, and what was only a potential extension at the beginning of the project was having some in-person workshops to ‘beta test’ the training. I can honestly say that there was just not enough time to have a ‘perfect training workshop’ (and simulation added toward the end) ready but I actually think in the long-run it was probably best for the project how the workshops turned out. First we needed to identify two locations where we could fairly easily bring HOT community members together. One was quite obvious, since HOT has an office and staff in Jakarta, Indonesia; and the other location chosen was Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; where HOT currently has a community building project/partnership, Dar Ramani Huria.

Almost as soon as we announced that we were organizing the workshop in Dar, our partners at the World Bank basically gave ‘an offer we could not refuse’ – that being to conduct our workshop as part of, and have our workshop participants attend, the first ever Africa Open Data Conference. This limited the time we had to conduct the training and Activation simulation to roughly ½ day each. However, it gave us 5 days together as a group to discuss all kinds of HOT things and ultimately helped complete and improve some key components of the training and simulation before the workshop in Jakarta. Not to forget being able to attend a great conference and create connections among Open advocates from all around the region.

Side note: In between Tanzania and Jakarta, I took a little vacation to Mongolia with a quick meeting/OSM meet and greet with the HOT interns in Ulaanbaatar then toured through the Gobi desert.

For the second Activation Workshop we had much more time dedicated to the training and simulation over 3 days; plus the improvements made to the training center and simulation. This time I think we were able to get a more realistic/collaborative simulation and further explore what needs to happen in the next iteration of the training center and how we might do more simulations, live and/or virtually, in the future. All good things must come to an end and after being on the road for a few weeks with too many hours on a plane to want to remember, I was ready to get home; but it’s always hard to leave another great time spent with amazing people in the HOT/OSM community.

Thank you everyone involved in the project and part of this incredible journey,

=Russ