Last week I met with people from MSF UK ( http://www.msf.org.uk Medicins Sans
Frontiers - Doctors Without Borders ) This is to relay some of points
discussed. TL;DR: there's lots of ways MSF and HOT can work together.
Mapping DRC is a priority right now.
The London office supports emergency missions through it's specialist medical
unit (Manson Unit). The response coordination desk is elsewhere, but this
office supports both short term and long term emergencies and has strong role
in supporting operational research in MSF, meaning they try to come up with
innovative solutions to field problems. This includes a small team developing
some GIS capabilities.
We spent some time talking about DRC. MSF are active here right now. Insecurity
and violence in eastern congo continues, and clearly there are lots of
humanitarian efforts ongoing there. It's a high priority area for mapping. This
job http://tasks.hotosm.org/job/102 (which mostly looks finished actually), and
other mapping progress in DRC could be useful to MSF.
I told them about aerial imagery being a limiting factor for our remote
mapping, and the twin challenges: permission to derive vector data, and
technical (geo-rectifying, tiling and hosting) They may be able to help
formulate requests for imagery in important areas. We discussed the potential
of aerial photography techniques such as balloon photography, so MSF may
eventually own some of their own imagery resources. I imagine the technical
aspects of that are an area we can help with.
Actually while discussing I had imagined that we had approximately zero bing
imagery available in DRC, but I see there *are* some strips on there now:
http://bit.ly/DRCbing Would be good to get a clearer picture of that.
We talked about various GIS use cases, of which only some are playing to the
strengths of OpenStreetMap. A lot of data they could really benefit from, is
the kind of data which we haven't been able to get hold of either. They'd like
to do fairly zoomed out choropleth maps, for which the main data they'd need is
some administrative boundaries. They also need maps which show where villages
are, with names. We talked about how GNIS data is sadly lacking precision,
leading to weirdness like thishttp://osm.org/go/wE9IcVt-- (interestingly this
area of Nigeria has new hi-res bing imagery since I last looked at it) I tried
to stress that if they do find sources of improved data e.g. their own field
workers, then getting this into OpenStreetmap is a very effective way of
sharing it.
Around all of these topics I described OpenStreetMap in detail. I also
demonstrated JOSM, and talked about offline capabiities. I also described some
of the aims HOT, to get out on the ground ourselves as part of humanitarian
responses.
There are areas where we can certainly help them with data or with data
gathering processes. They have done work on population estimates by counting
buildings, so our Indonesia disaster preparedness work serves an example of
doing this the OSM way. We can work towards serving their use cases with remote
mapping, even where we can't go the whole way e.g. village maps without names,
and ensuring basic natural features (coastline and large rivers) are mapped
correctly from low-res imagery for the purposes of basic medium-zoom basemaps.
Of course I invited her to bring us more specific mapping targets when they
have them, and she has shared a list of the mapping priorities they have "where
we eventually need our operational areas base-mapped to the village level"
http://wiki.osm.org/MSF_mapping_priorities
The other thing shared with me was a link to this joekit system they've been
building. A java program to go from spreadsheet data to KML.
http://code.google.com/p/joekit/
I imagine you all could bombard them with a million other suggestions for ways
of solving this problem better/differently. But at least we can be heartened to
see that they're not afraid to solve a problem with a bit of coding. We can
definitely teach these people to become OSMers :-) Also this gives a feel for
at least one class of GIS problem they're tackling: Very zoomed out maps of
disease outbreaks.
Clearly there's lots of ways MSF and HOT can work together. We've resolved to
stay in touch and meet again soon, so I suppose if people have suggestions for
further things I should raise with them, let me have them.
Harry Wood
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