We are pleased to announce the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies is joining the Missing Maps Partnership. Missing Maps is an open, collaborative project in which you can help to map areas where humanitarian organisations are trying to meet the needs of vulnerable people – creating open data that can be used for planning, awareness, and analysis. Over 33,000 people have contributed 33 million edits to OpenStreetMap since Missing Maps was founded in 2014. These contributions have been used to support health interventions, emergency response and resilience programs. Volunteers, organizations, and humanitarians collaborate in a number of ways: remote mapping, field mapping and humanitarian activities.

Founded by the American Red Cross, British Red Cross, Médecins Sans Frontières and Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, Missing Maps connects a global community of volunteers to humanitarian response. Other Movement members also include the Netherlands Red Cross and the Canadian Red Cross. Some of the mapathon activities initiatives include mapping tasks in support of work of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Nepal Red Cross Society, Tanzania Red Cross Society and Malawi Red Cross Society. Mapathons have been hosted by many national societies including Finnish Red Cross, German Red Cross, and others. As we grow this program, we anticipate more collaboration across the Movement. Read more…

The Global Partnership for Suitable Development Data (GPSDD) announced one of the biggest initiatives to support collaborative data innovations. 400 applications were summited and after a very close decision, 10 projects will be piloted with the support of the World’s Bank Trust Fund for Statistical Capacity Building (TFSCB). All ten proposals have a strong background in data production, dissemination and use, most of them aiming to try their approaches in low and middle-income countries across Africa, the Middle East and Asia.

The diversity of selected projects covers all kind of innovations, water level monitoring and alert using telecommunication networks, utilising satellite waves to detect illegal fishing and counter human traffic, improving vital registration for Syrian refugees in Lebanon, predictive machine learning methodology to help aid workers foresee patients’ behaviour, etc. Read the complete list here.

Within the selected projects, the Netherlands Red Cross in partnership with Malawi Red Cross Society and CartONG will launch an initiative to use building collaborative data to support Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) on Health and Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH). This innovation will be tested in Malawi and in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Malawi Red Cross volunteer working in the field collecting data using his mobile phone

The Malawi Red Cross Society volunteer working in the field collecting data using his mobile phone

The objective is to make better health and WASH decisions and interventions using data collaboration between development and humanitarian actors, academia, government and digital volunteers. To start building and strengthening information bridges between all these organisations, collaborative digital tools and dashboards will be used. The project builds on open data and open source technologies, to facilitate interaction among involved parties.

One of the highlighted innovations of the project is identifying with partners the best practices for data collection for WASH and Health data, and to agree on common standards and tools to collect these data collaboratively. The expected outcome is to facilitate the availability of new data sources and an increased data literacy of the stakeholders.

The project will be supported by 510, the Netherlands Red Cross initiative for smart use of data to make humanitarian aid faster and more (cost)effective. Find out more about 510 here. For the next 18 months, you will certainly hear more about all these innovations, which will improve by learning from successes and failure and start shaping the future of humanitarian response.

[ed. note: Data @ IFRC is a blog series to share highlights from the Red Cross Red Crescent Secretariat and National Societies. We will include learning opportunities and thought pieces on all things data from ethics to evidence.] Maps have always been storytelling devices. And, the art of mapmaking is a community-building exercise. Missing Maps and YouthMappers are two programs which provide unique ways to connect humanitarian work to mapmaking. YouthMappers, with university chapters around the world, connects humanitarian mapping needs to education programs. Their main target group is university-level geography (GIS) students. Missing Maps is both a global and local program that supports mapathons around the world. Inspired by both concepts, data scientists Heather Leson and Guido Pizzini co-hosted a Missing Map event for youth at Ecole Internationale Geneva. See below the complete narration;

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Les données OpenStreetMap sont gratuites et accessibles par tout le monde. Pensez-y comme “Wikipédia pour les cartes.” Vous pouvez éditer, je peux l’éditer et cela reflète fondamentalement le monde qui nous entoure. C’est génial parce que si votre endroit ou localité n’est pas sur la carte, vous pouvez la mettre. Et cela s’applique pour les endroits partout au Mali, et il s’applique aux endroits du monde entier. Ces endroits peuvent être partagé avec d’autre personnes sous forme des données ouvertes. C’est à la fois une base de données et une communauté de personnes qui sont construites autour de la fixation de la carte du monde et de la rendre accessible et ouverte à tous.

La carte que nous essayons de construire dans OpenStreetMap ces jours-ci est un document vivant et respirant. Il y a des entreprises qui en bénéficie dans leurs affaires en une semaine. Par exemple une route a été élargie, ou une route a été raccourcie, peut-être qu’un trottoir a été ajouté. Si nous cartographions ce que nous pensons être des choses inoffensives comme les infrastructures et les autres POI, cela a des utilisations en aval. Nous pouvons créer une application d’infrastructure ou de ces POI, comme Nous le souhaitons, car les données seront existes et accessible à tous.