A brief history of Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team

In May, we spoke about using maps for disaster resilience (https://www.meetup.com/GeoBLR/events/222608375/) and the story of how OpenStreetMap mapped Nepal after the earthquake. Between then and now, we witnessed Hurricane Patricia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Patricia) in Mexico, an earthquake (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Hindu_Kush_earthquake) in Afghanistan and massive floods in South India (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_South_Indian_floods).

This edition of GeoBLR will feature Mikel Maron (https://twitter.com/mikel), co-founder of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team and Maning Sambale (https://twitter.com/maningsambale), longtime member of HOT from the Philippines, to share a brief history of HOT.

http://photos2.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/1/4/0/8/600_444725128.jpeg

From December 2005 to January 2010, HOT existed as a series of conversations, blog posts, presentations and emails about the wild idea to connect disaster response to OpenStreetMap (a crazy idea in itself). Mikel and Maning will dig into the vaults and bring out key moments in the evolution of this wild idea to reality, from the origins in the nascent crisis mapping community during Katrina and the South Asia Tsunami, through building support with forward thinking humanitarians and human thinking technologies, to the first HOT activation in Gaza, the naming of HOT, and the first use of OSM data in a humanitarian map.