Mapping Support Event for Nepal at ISCRAM conference 2015 in Norway

As members of the disastermappers heidelberg and the GIScience Research Group Benjamin Herfort and Melanie Eckle were presenting their research at this years ISCRAM conference in Kristiansand, Norway. ISCRAM being a conference for researchers and practitioners in the field of disaster and emergency management, they also used this situation to set up a spontaneous Mapping Support Event for Nepal (as done earlier in Heidelberg).

In this manner they showed the ISCRAM community how to support relief efforts in Nepal remotely and moreover provided insights about the practice of disaster management in a developing country directly from the ground. Therefore we also invited Dr. Nama Raj Budhathoki, Executive Director of the Kathmandu Living Labs (KLL) team, via Skype.

The session started with a short introduction and video showing the help efforts of KLL team following the earthquakes in Nepal and ways how to support the team remotely, see here.

Nama then provided an overview about the activities and happenings in Nepal and the current situation on the ground. Afterwards the participants were invited for a Q&A.

Following this we started the hands on remote mapping session in which we focused on a priority task for Nepal in the HOT Tasking Manager, see the great results here:

Big thanks to everyone who participated!

Ref:
HERFORT, B., ECKLE, M., ALBUQUERQUE, J. P., ZIPF, A. (2015). Towards assessing the quality of volunteered geographic information from OpenStreetMap for identifying critical infrastructures. ISCRAM 2015 – 12th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management. Kristiansand, Norway.

ECKLE, M., ALBUQUERQUE, J. P. (2015). Quality Assessment of Remote Mapping in OpenStreetMap for Disaster Management Purposes. ISCRAM 2015 – 12th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management. Kristiansand, Norway.