I’ll put in a plug for Humanitarian OSM (https://www.hotosm.org/).  They prioritize projects that are requested by humanitarian a disaster relief efforts. They’re also hosting virtual mapathons, so we can be virtually social, map for good causes, and observe physical distancing.

Kathy Stroud

From: Maps-L: Map Librarians, etc. <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Angela R Cope
Sent: Thursday, March 26, 2020 8:13 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Relax and Map the World

FYI ...

Dear All,

How can the cartographic community help each other and the world in the current crisis at no cost using only your spare time ?

There are two possible ways:
1.  By digitising buildings and roads from aerial or satellite imagery (Bing) to increase the free data on OpenStreetMap (OSM) worldwide, in your local area or a place you have visited.  Very useful for emergency and communities in countries where the up-to-date mapping does not exist, or in you local area if it has not as yet been mapped in OSM and communities don't have full access to their national mapping.
2.  By using digitising for OSM as a useful and stress-free way to relax and occupy many spare hours.

OpenStreetMap (https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=10/55.9100/-3.8013)  free OpenSource maps.
Digitising can be done using the Edit mode directly in OSM (once registered with a user name) but lacks some of the many map editing tools used by cartographers.
JOSM is a free and extensible OpenSource editor for OpenStreetMap (OSM).  https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/JOSM
https://josm.openstreetmap.de/wiki/Introduction
JOSM is very user friendly (no Java programming involved) and it is as easy to use for digitising data from aerial imagery as any conventional GIS (QGIS; ArcGIS etc) or Graphics Software (Adobe Illustrator; CorelDRaw; Inkscape etc.).  It has many easy to use tools, plugins and commands to add, delete, move, scale or rotate digitised points, lines and polygons (attribute data can also be added and edited using presets).  There are tools and plugins for creating buildings, circles, making complex building shapes orthogonal, splitting terraced buildings into blocks etc etc.  You can sit and digitise for 10min, 1 hour or more at your leasure and upload your data in seconds, it then becomes 'live' worldwide in about 10 minutes.
Other OSM Editing Tools are available, digiting can also be done in QGIS and uploaded to OSM.

OpenStreetMap is free open data and can be contributed to from the comfort of your own home.

Take Care,
Mike Shand
University of Glasgow

Angie Cope 

AGS Library, UW Milwaukee Libraries

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