For the past couple weeks I was in Haiti with the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team. Our project was sponsored by the World Bank and the goal was to continue to build mapping capacity within Haiti. For those unaware OpenStreetMap is a project to create a free map of the entire world, in a method similar to Wikipedia anyone can edit it to add information or correct mistakes. Almost immediately after the January 12th earthquake volunteers from the OpenStreetMap community began digitizing roads from old satellite imagery. Soon after that imagery providers donated new imagery and volunteers continued to improve the map as well as create data products that could be downloaded onto GPS, printed and utilized in GIS systems. Data team members from GeoCommons gathered data from OSM and created overlays in Finder! as well as a dashboard in Map of the News.

The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team aims to apply the principles of open data and open source to humanitarian response and economic development. So far the team has had three missions to Haiti to facilitate these principles of open data. This has been primarily in the form of training. Following up on two previous missions Nicolas Chavent, Trevor Ellermann, Todd Huffman and I were in Haiti from June 19th – June 29th holding training with a variety of actors all over Haiti. The first week was spent in Port-au-Prince, but then we quickly moved on to Jacmel, Léogâne, Gonaïves and Carrefour.

What struck me most about the trip was how quickly Haitians understood OpenStreetMap and open geo-data. One afternoon Nicolas was explaining OpenStreetMap to a team of community mobilizers from the International Office on Migration (IOM). The community mobilizers are an interface between IOM and those living in the spontaneous settlement sites managed by the Office. I don’t speak any French, but the entire trip I enjoyed watching people’s reactions when learning about OSM. Initially when Nicolas started explaining OSM to them they listened politely, but soon they were listening intently. Everyone leaned in closer and closer and hung on every word. Then it was decided amongst their group that everyone needed to come in on Saturday to be trained in OpenStreetMap, there was no choice. The importance of being able to map where resources are in a rapidly changing environment and for Haitians to do this themselves was clear to the group. I can’t imagine seeing the same intensity for open data in the United States, but I suppose we haven’t had the need to develop the same hunger for it. One of the main questions in Haiti is what happens when International organizations start leaving, who maintains things then? Hopefully through the work of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team and our Haitian partners the answer can be the Haitian people.

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OpenStreetMap in the
World Bank Haiti Situation Room

For the past 3 weeks, since January 12, we’ve been actively involved in many efforts to provide support and analysis of the Haiti earthquake recovery. From immediate OpenStreetMap efforts to get imagery open licensed and traced, to working through CrisisCommons to get new volunteers mapping, creating dashboard common operating pictures of population affected by the event, emerging IDP camp locations, distribution centers, and gathering normalized health facilities around the country.

Historically, these tools have been useful for the public and media to cover an event – but the question often arose if they were beneficial to responders and citizens on the ground. It’s been clear that tools such as OpenStreetMap have had a clear and positive impact on the response and recovery efforts. Organizations from the World Bank, to MapAction, to the Fairfax Search and Rescue teams have all been using OSM as a primary means of maps and routing. OSM volunteers have even been performing rough damage assessement and IDP camp identification.

While these tools have been useful for responders, there was still a disconnect on the availability of this data to the Haitian Government to access and assess the situations. The best data previously available before the earthquake is primarily from 2002, and at the same time most ministries are either non-existent or severely understaffed.

Bringing the Commons

Portable Hard drives with data
and map tools for the Haiti Government

In response, at CrisisCamp DC on Saturday the World Bank initiated an effort to provide the massive amounts of data and tools directly to the government. The goal was to provide a browser, like the Haiti Crisis Map with the imagery and OpenStreetMap roads, data gathering and visualization tools like GeoCommons, public and quality checked sources of Hospital locations, camps, and damage assessment, and the World Bank’s own flyover imagery on portable hard drives and onto the desk of the Haitian ministers.

A major hurdle, however, was that there were no local copies of the raw imagery data. Thanks to the incredibly hard work of a number of organizations, especially Georgetown, SDSU and Internet2, we were able to move the 1.25 TB of raw data from the Hypercube server in San Diego to Georgetown’s servers here in DC in a little over a day. These were loaded onto a series of 6 USB, self-powered hard drives. We chose the self-powered drives so it didn’t depend on external plugs or fluctuating power sources.

In addition, we built an offline version of the Haiti Browser that can run by double-clicking an HTML file to run in a browser off of a hard drive or USB stick. You can get the code from here to see how it’s done. We also included Delta State’s MGRS Atlases for printing map books, and the GPS map images that can be used on Garmin handheld units.

There will also be several engineers deploying with the World Bank to assist in the dissemination of the data, working with the Haitian Ministries and President on using these tools and handling requests for more analysis and data with CNIGS (Centre National de l’Information Géo-Spatiale), Haiti’s GIS department.

Enabling Self-Sufficient Government

The goal is to provide the Haitian government with their own capability of using the available tools for situational awareness and decision making. Beyond the immediate response and recovery efforts they are now enabled to utilize these tools for long-term reconstruction and infrastructure. The capabilities and tools should be sustainable and the goal is to close the data loop within the government as well as between external data collection and Haitian data needs and collection. We are moving beyond the traditional problems of leaving disasters without their own data or ability to be independent of the temporary organizations. The entire project is a model of how crowd-sourced data and tool development can have a beneficial impact both on remote support as well as directly to local citizens and government.

In the US and Europe, we’re seeing a growing embrace of Open Government and transparency sharing data to citizens for engagement and collaboration. In Haiti, the community is performing a reverse-Gov2.0 – they’re providing data and information to the government to respond, and rebuild their society.

A tremendous thank you to the numerous individuals and groups that helped and provided tools or data: World Bank, San Diego State University / Calit2, Internet2, Georgetown University, DigitalGlobe, Delta State University, Sahaha, Crisis Mappers, OpenStreetMap, NOAA, Ushahidi, DevelopmentSeed, TelaScience, STAR-TIDES, CrisisCommons, USAID, GeoCommons, OpenSGI, GeoEye.

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