“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. [email protected]

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.

… See full entry