Washington, DC, USA · Washington, DC, USA · Connecticut Ave/ K Street, Washington, DC, USA
industry
Non-Profit Organization Management
Size
201-1000 employees
Stage
Other
founded in
2010
Free, collaboratively generated maps are uniquely valuable to humanitarian work and economic development, especially in places where base map data is often missing, out of date, or rapidly changing. OpenStreetMap is an open data project founded to create a free and open map of the world, built primarily by volunteers surveying with pencil and paper, GPS units, or by digitizing aerial imagery and finding and liberating existing public sources of geographic data.
Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT), a US 501(c)(3) charitable organization, was launched in 2010 to promote and support the thousands of volunteers and dozens of local groups around the world that work to build OpenStreetMap, with an emphasis on humanitarian mapping to aid disaster relief, preparedness, and economic development.
In its role organizing crisis response mapping, HOT acts as a bridge between the OpenStreetMap community and traditional humanitarian responders like MSF, the Red Cross, and UNOCHA.