Inside The Crowdsourced Map Project That Is Helping Contain The Ebola Epidemic ⚙ Co.Labs ⚙ code + community

" ... Organizations working in the three hardest-hit countries, Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia, need doctors and medical equipment. But they also need something more basic: maps to help aid workers get around the country and do the difficult job of checking village by village for victims of the disease. That's why organizations like the UN, Red Cross, and Doctors Without Borders have turned to OpenStreetMaps (OSM) for their map data. Commonly referred to as the 'Wikipedia for maps,' OSM is a crowdsourced mapping project that brings together mappers on the ground using GPS devices with map editors working remotely. A subset of the OSM community, the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) has taken on creating more robust maps of the affected countries in West Africa. HOT is a specialized team that responds to international humanitarian crises by corralling OSM volunteers to gear their efforts to impacted areas. Using free and open source software designed by them specifically for this purpose, HOT has been able to produce detailed, freely available maps ..."