American Red Cross is very excited to announce a USD $25,000 grant to OpenStreetMap Foundation for a hardware purchase to support the ongoing resilience of the OSM infrastructure. The funds were allocated towards the purchase and provisioning of a ‘hot’ backup database failover server – which has been purchased and is currently humming along doing its important job! This trail-blazing contribution will ensure that we can recover from site failures quickly and with the minimum amount of disruption for those editing the map. This is a big step forward in platform resiliency that we otherwise would not have been able to make at this time.
American Red Cross and OpenStreetMap
The American Red Cross has steadily ramped up our support for OpenStreetMap since our first mapathon in to map communities in Uganda in 2012. Identifying OSM as a source of up-to-date map data crucial to their international disaster field operations, we’ve quickly developed into a major contributor to OSM and support of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT). Most recently through the Missing Maps initiative, to which around 10% of all OSM map contributions can now be attributed. The American Red Cross also supports OpenStreetMap through app development and sponsorship of State of the Map conferences.
If you are interested in the technical specifications of this new server.
We hope more organizations which use OSM data will be inspired to strengthen the OSMF infrastructure and support our great project! If you are interested in donating to the OpenStreetMap Foundation, please get email them at board@osmfoundation.org.
About OpenStreetMap
The OpenStreetMap Foundation is a not-for-profit organization, formed in the UK to support the OpenStreetMap Project. It is dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free geospatial data and to providing geospatial data for anyone to use and share. The OpenStreetMap Foundation owns and maintains the infrastructure of the OpenStreetMap project. You can support OpenStreetMap by becoming a member, donating or joining our volunteer Working Groups.
About the American Red Cross
The American Red Cross shelters, feeds and provides emotional support to victims of disasters in the US; teaches skills that save lives; provides international humanitarian aid; and supports military members and their families. In 2017 alone, the American Red Cross sent humanitarian aid to 26 countries to help save lives in the aftermath of disasters. The Red Cross is a not-for-profit organization that depends on volunteers and the generosity of the American public to perform its mission. Visit redcross.org/international of more information.