Humanitarian OSM Team/Open Mapping Hub - Latin America and The Caribbean
Humanitarian OSM Team/Open Mapping Hub - Latin America and The Caribbean
The Open Mapping Hub - Latin America and The Caribbean (LAC Hub) works to promote open, collaborative and humanitarian mapping, in 33 priority countries across Latin America and The Caribbean. The LAC Hub is one of the four regional hubs supported by Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT).
The LAC Hub works under the Impact Areas concept to connect open mapping with real world applications through spatial data use in the humanitarian and development sectors. Each impact area provides a framework for technical and subject matter expertise for partnerships, grantmaking, and community support. These Impact areas are:
- Disasters & Climate Resilience
- Sustainable Cities & Communities
- Public Health
- Displacement & Safe Migration
- Gender Equality
History
In early 2021 HOT conducted a series of consultations in Latin America region to know how the concept of an “Open Mapping Hub” could support and benefit local open mapping communities, projects and people. In parallel HOT also supported the Open Cities project to bring value to local areas in the region (Mexico, Guatemala, Santa Lucía, Dominica and Jamaica) through mapping.
After the consultations, input and feedback from local communities, HOT saw the need to take a more community-driven approach in creating a Hub in the region, an approach which surfaced local needs, challenges and opportunities, as well as be driven by local people through a much deeper, region-wide engagement on what the hub should be and do.
So, after trying a traditional approach, HOT decided to design and test activities that, not only bring value to people but also help HOT, communities and other open mapping actors engage together and learn and co-design what an Open Mapping Hub serving the region could look like and do. HOT called this the “Hub Alpha” phase and the goal was to have enough experience and information by the end of Q2 2022 to kick-start the formation of the Hub 1.0.
In early 2022, HOT started the “Alpha” phase, opened a hiring process for the team and through the process of interviewing the candidates, worked on co-designing what the initial projects of the Hub could be. All these new projects fell in these categories: Field projects, Exploration projects and General Regional Support, and more about some of them can be found in this article.
In November 2022 in association with the OSM Peru community, the Hub held the Grassroots Management of Disaster Risks and OpenStreetMap LATAM 2022 event in Lima, Peru. It was a very successful event that allowed the local OSM community to expand and grow not only in terms of number of members but also in a variety of projects and scope in the short and medium term.
At the end of the first quarter of 2023, Fabrizio Scrollini joined the Hub's team as their first Director. Since then, the actions of the LATAM team have been strengthened, new projects are being evaluated and a team for the Caribbean sub-region is being formed. The Hub is currently preparing the bases of what will be its main work programs for 2024, which will be announced shortly.
Objectives
- Support local projects that work with open cartographic data, showing how they can contribute to people’s well-being.
- Engage with local communities and document the issues and opportunities open mapping can contribute to, fostering relationships and support among peers, HOT, communities, organizations and governments.
- Connect the different regional actors and support opportunities that benefit Open Mapping knowledge throughout LAC to support open data infrastructure in the region.
- Co-design with communities, volunteers and other actors of the open mapping of the region what the Hub could be and do.
Projects
- Canoa de Tolda
- Mapping volcanoes in Ecuador
- The project factory
- Participatory transport mapping in Michoacan
- Open Cities Guatemala
- Open Cities Mexico
- Open Cities Jamaica
- Open Cities Dominica
- Mapping Climate Ready Cities- Latin America
Data quality approach
An approach to improve OpenStreetMap data quality in LATAM.
Main article: Data Quality Approach LAC
Contact the Open Mapping Hub - LAC
- Via email at hublac@hotosm.org