#272 Disaster Mapping

An hour of your time can help responders thousands of miles away.

Puerto Rico has been hit twice by devastating hurricanes. There were two earthquakes in Mexico. There are still two more hurricanes in the Atlantic ocean heading for the Caribbean, again. People are without electricity and water, and their homes and workplaces have been damaged or destroyed.

First responders need to have good maps to know where things used to be, and where people used to live, to look for survivors, and to try to restore or rebuild. The best ways to have good maps is to pay a lot of people a lot of money – untenable in these situations – or for hundreds of volunteers, working anywhere in the world, updating OpenStreetMap, the Wikipedia of worldwide maps.

Longtime Chi Hack Night member and transportation writer Steven Vance will introduce you to OpenStreetMap, and dive right into a simple editing job. Anyone can do this, and it’s beneficial to responders to have you spend a couple of hours, or even 10 minutes every other day, to ensure maps for areas struck by disaster have all the buildings and roads that were there prior to the disaster.

ASL This event will have an American Sign Language interpreter.

Food Food and drinks will be provided. We encourage attendees to bring their own water bottles to reduce waste.