Not quite two years ago American Red Cross, British Red Cross, Medicine Sans Frontiers and the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team came together to start Missing Maps.
We all believed it would be a success and allow us to grow our usage of maps and GIS data within the humanitarian sector. Our simple idea was to try and map those people that are not on the map. Those people that are on the margins of society and cannot advocate for themselves because either people in power didn’t know they existed or people in power chose to ignore that they existed. We chose to contribute to OpenStreetMap because of the strength of the community and the openness of the data. Missing Maps has become a run away success powered by thousands of volunteers who’ve contributed millions of edits to OpenStreetMap. Over nearly the last two years you almost 10,000 mappers have contributed over 22 million edits, almost 3 million buildings and 300,000 km of roads. These achievements are truly amazing. The new blog will focus on sharing some of the personal stories and major events happening with Missing Maps.
As all things with Missing Maps we iterate and learn from one another. With the new website we thought it would be a great way to share our lessons learned from hosting several mapathons a week around the world to field mapping areas the size of Switzerland. We will continue to post blogs both here and OSM Diaries. We want the maximum amount of input to and from the OSM community as possible.