To elaborate on this idea further, the idea of liaisons is to be a person (or group of people) who will be a permanent link between OSM/HOT and a specific NGO. The purpose of the liaison group is to meet regularly with their NGO contacts and discuss problems/feedback for the relationship with HOT and then feed that back to the community. I.E. to be a bridge between HOT and a given NGO.
In the particular case of India with the recent flooding, we got some requests to map areas, without any real specific instructions on what/where to map, and then in became apparent that the data wasn't being used, so the activation kind of died out. If we get proper requests from NGO's and and some kind of indication of how they plan to utilize the data then I think there are plenty of people willing to contribute. The liaison procedures are still being formalized and we plan to try them out with the upcoming work in Africa, but if there are NGO's who want to work with us in India, we could further test this procedure there as well. We need to be careful that when we ask volunteers to work on a given project, that the data contributed actually gets used in the field. This was another key point discussed in the Actvation Working Group meeting that Russ mentioned. -AndrewBuck
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