Kathmandu before and after OpenStreetMap’s humanitarian team dived in.
In just 48 hours after Nepal’s devastating earthquake, thousands of volunteers from around the world helped create maps that guided emergency response teams.
Many of these “digital humanitarians” came from OpenStreetMap, an open source mapping effort. OpenStreet Map launched Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) in 2010 after the earthquake in Haiti, when the office safeguarding country’s maps pancaked in the 7.0 temblor.
Schuyler Erle shows what happened to Haiti’s mapping office post earthquake.