Last week, Benjamin Herfort and Melanie Eckle of the HeiGIT team were invited to the MSF office in London to join a workshop around “Making sense of humanitarian geospatial data: assessing data, methods and governance practices to improve the impact of humanitarian interventions on health and wellbeing”, organized by the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick in Coventry.
The Warwick team gathered participants with a background and expertise in GIS, epidemiology, medical innovation as well as tech and community leads from MSF, British Red Cross, the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team and Bangladesh Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Operations Team (BHOOT), MapAction, Healthsites as well as University representatives from the Imperial College London and our group to discuss current approaches and challenges and most importantly: how to collaboratively address them.
The first day, participants provided an overview of their projects, information gaps and limitations in data use. The particpants then defined and prioritized emerging common themes that were transformed into direct action points and a collaborative research agenda the next day. Please also find further information about the background of the workshop and the agenda here.
The two-day event was perfectly round off with the London Missing Maps Mid-Month Mapathon. The participants of the workshop and London Missing Maps community herein had the chance to further discuss the workshop insights and receive direct community feedback. Tasauf A Baki Billah, community lead of the BHOOT team, furthermore provided an overview of their previous and current activities and the inspiring developments all around OSM in Bangladesh.
We thank everyone for the great exchanges and discussions and are excited to commonly put our ideas into action.