Harry
This is good news.
I will come back later today on this. I am in contact with people in
RDC-Congo. We have established priorities and I prepare new tasks for mapping
various areas around Bukavu lake.
Pierre
>________________________________
> De : Harry Wood <[email protected]>
>À : "[email protected]" <[email protected]>
>Envoyé le : Vendredi 7 décembre 2012 13h02
>Objet : [HOT] Meeting with MSF UK
>
>
>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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>[email protected]
>http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/hot
>
>
>
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