“A challenged world is an alert world. Individually, we’re all responsible for our own thoughts and actions - all day, every day. We can all choose to challenge and call out gender bias and inequality. We can all choose to seek out and celebrate women’s achievements. Collectively, we can all help create an inclusive world.

From challenge comes change, so let’s all choose to challenge.” from the International Women’s Day 2021 website

The theme for International Women’s Day 2021, which is officially celebrated on 8 March, is “Choose to Challenge”. The Community Working Group has chosen to challenge all forms of gender bias and inequality within the OSM ecosystem across the month of March by organizing events featuring community members, activists, and experts.

If you are interested in participating in one of these virtual events or can recommend a person or organization to potentially serve as a speaker, panelist, facilitator, or in another capacity, please comment on this post or contact me directly (info below). We hope to co-create the format and content of the events in collaboration with our speakers.

We welcome all questions and recommendations!!

Contact info:

1. courtneyclark8@gmail.com

2. HOT Slack: Message me @courtney_clark or post in the Community WG channel.

I recently had the honor of being nominated to membership of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, and I have written this entry to express my interest in membership and my vision for HOT’s future.

I received my first training in OpenStreetMap for humanitarian response as a Peace Corps Public Health Volunteer living in Guinea, West Africa. As a Peace Corps Volunteer I contributed to strengthening a local health system and clinic through Guinea’s Ministry of Health, and I saw firsthand Guinean health professionals’ urgent need to access better data of all types. Local health clinics were understaffed and lacked basic equipment and infrastructure. In the face of critical medical crises such as high malaria and malnutrition rates, accurate data collection ranked low on priority lists but would have been incredibly useful in targeting certain neighborhoods for prenatal care campaigns or subsidized food distributions.

I was actually unable to contribute to OpenStreetMap while living in Guinea because my Internet connection was either too slow or too costly. I finally made my first contribution to OSM through HOT at the height of the Ebola crisis, when Peace Corps evacuated its volunteers from Guinea and I began organizing virtual Ebola mapping events for the Peace Corps community in the United States.

Since January 2015, I have coordinated the global Peace Corps community’s involvement in open mapping through HOT. I dedicate much of my time to training and supporting current Peace Corps Volunteers and their counterparts in any field projects which feature an OSM component. Our 6,800 Volunteers serve in 65 countries, mostly in rural, developing communities, and I believe that we have a large capacity to catalyze the development and growth of local OSM communities around the world.

I also coordinate crowdsourced mapping activities in the United States by engaging with American high schools and middle schools, universities, companies, community groups and Returned Peace Corps Volunteer groups. Since February 2015, OSM mappers have contributed 1.5 million edits on behalf of the changeset comment #PeaceCorps.

We’re starting to engage even more closely with students, especially girls, in an effort to train the future generation of OSM mappers and address gender disparity in the community. The HOT community and the Tasking Manager have been absolutely critical to the sustained growth of this program and to our Volunteers’ use of open geographic data in their field projects in public health, agriculture, small business and more.

I have also contributed by mapping for a variety of HOT Activations post-disaster, and to me HOT represents an incredible example of human collaboration and coordination from every time zone and walk of life. I am incredibly impressed by the vitality of the community, as evident by the constant filling of my inbox with emails from the HOT list (written with a smile – I truly know of no other community that so values spirited, transparent discussion yet, at the end of the day, is able to come together for a shared cause that is bigger than ourselves).

I believe that voting members of HOT have a unique, critical responsibility to represent the best interests of the larger community, and I would be honored to have such a responsibility and would take my duties as a member very seriously. Voting members of HOT must, of course, apply their best judgment and conduct thorough research when voting for HOT board members, but my most important responsibility as a member would be to ensure that HOT remains committed to diversity, inclusion and the sustainable growth of local communities.

OSM data will always be more accurate and detailed the more diverse the HOT and OSM communities. I would also like to serve as an advocate for HOT through participating in and hosting events, educating others about our mission through networking, building relationships with partners and writing content for the HOT website, blog and social media. While HOT has received a lot of excellent press coverage, I would like to work with the community to create more replicable case studies on applications of OSM in humanitarian and development projects. I would also like to challenge myself to learn more about the process of HOT activations and to dedicate more time to assisting in conducting productive activations that provide data when and where it is most needed.

Looking ahead, HOT’s biggest challenge lies in supporting the creation, growth and maintenance of local OSM communities around the world. Many members of the community know that the response in Nepal was greatly aided by the existence of a Nepalese OSM community through Kathmandu Living Labs, and it has been said frequently that we should be building mapping communities before disaster strikes, not after. That is easier said than done, of course, but it is a challenge that I am excited to address in collaboration with the HOT and the humanitarian and international development communities, and I will leverage the network of the Peace Corps in order to do so. We’ll also need a top-notch fundraising strategy, continued online communications, and creative ways to engage currently underrepresented populations in OSM, including people living in extreme poverty, women and the differently abled community. I look forward to addressing these challenges as potential HOT member.