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Are you ready? Bridging the resiliency gap with OpenStreetMaps

Ski-U-Mah
Friday, 11:30 AM – 20 min
nicole martinelli

You may think you know your neighborhood, but does your mental map include how to avoid the nearest construction sites or where you might shelter in place in an emergency? What about the closest hospital with disaster care? The good news: All of these assets and hazards are already available in OpenStreetMaps.

Resiliency Maps is a project that aims to put this kind of map in the hands of anyone who wants to make them - offline and in print - so they know where to go in an emergency.

It came about because, as a San Francisco native with emergency prep training, there was no decent map to put in my go bag. While the city has a robust emergency management department, exemplary resilience programs for residents and a large open-data portal, many people were still using the paper tourist maps (not even to scale!) or making maps with proprietary options — and getting locked out due to changes in these APIs.

This session details our progress (and a few pitfalls!) of working with local government, open data, open software, community organizations and the OSM community to make these maps. We’ve logged a bunch of changesets, pitched tags, organized mapathons and are ticking away at mass imports and visualization options. Let’s work on this together!