FLICKR, SUE CLARKIn 2010, Ivan Gayton of Doctors Without Borders responded to call from a nun in Haiti, who described how her town was suffering from an outbreak of cholera following a massive earthquake. But finding her wasn’t easy, Gayton recounted to The Guardian, in large part because there was no decent map of the area. “Much of the time [the address given] may as well be random syllables,” Gayton said. “If there was a point source for cholera in Haiti, we wouldn’t have known where it was. We needed a map—to be able to correlate the alerts we hear and our patient origins to something on the ground.”
Enter the Missing Maps project, a collaborative effort launched this month by the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT), Doctors Without Borders, the American Red Cross, and the British Red Cross that aims to create free digital maps for every village and town on the planet. The Guardian called it “nothing less than a human genome project for the world’s cities.”
The method for developing the new maps was created by the HOT, and involves volunteers around the world. Anyone with an internet connection can use a simple point-and-click tool to note the locations of landmarks, such as roads, parks, and buildings on satellite images that have been entered into free mapping software called OpenStreetMap. The satellite images are then removed and the rudimentary maps printed, and ...
