Lash OpenStreetMaps Transcript

Lash OpenStreetMaps Transcript

In July, I started to hear rumors a little bit about the Ebola outbreak, the reported cases, and obviously because of my historical work on filoviruses and the personal connections I had developed with friends in the Viral Special Pathogens Branch, I was very interested in trying to stay abreast. Also, there was new GIS technology that was becoming more readily available and more popular. Specifically, a volunteer mapping project called OpenStreetMap became increasingly important. Outside of CDC's response to those initial cases of Ebola and Guinea in 2014, Doctors Without Borders or Medecins Sans Frontieres, MSF, had also been responding. MSF had GIS people who were also trying to use maps and the latest technology to support the field response. What MSF ended up coordinating and doing was they were coordinating with the OpenStreetMap community, and the OpenStreetMap community is a volunteer technical community. It's all volunteers, and the mission of OpenStreetMap is to create a freely available global map of the world. It's kind of like taking Google Maps and mashing it up with Wikipedia. These volunteers, like editors to Wikipedia, can come in and they can upload GPS data for where roads are anywhere in the world, and then increasingly common, also using satellite imagery. Anybody with an internet connection and a web browser can connect to the OpenStreetMap portal, and they can begin helping to digitize maps and infrastructure on the ground. That's what MSF had done that was really innovative in 2014, and I had been paying attention to that because I found it to be exciting and a novel application. I was working on the Yellow Books, the Ebola outbreak was going on, I had other friends in this OpenStreetMap community outside of CDC, so occasionally I was getting personal emails saying, hey, what do you know about what's going on there? And similarly independent of that, the MSF people were coordinating with the OpenStreetMap volunteers and another specific group of OpenStreetMap volunteers called the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, or HOT. What they accomplished was in the remote villages in Guinea--I think it was Forecariah Province--they mapped in great detail very quickly the roads and houses of these villages where the outbreak was occurring. As volunteers are making these maps from satellite imagery, the data is able to be downloaded by anybody else in the world. Within hours, probably more likely within a day or two, MSF contractors in Guinea were downloading this brand new OpenStreetMap data so that they could make the most detailed maps of the outbreak to support the case investigation and case finding. All of that was happening, and I was very excited by that work. But my job responsibility was to continue to make the Yellow Book maps because that had a deadline of October 1st, and my supervisor said we couldn't be delayed.

I was still finding a little extra free time though in the process of making the Yellow Book maps, like I said, to stay abreast. I actually helped provide a few training classes because OpenStreetMap, particularly editing data and contributing data in OpenStreetMap, was something that few people at CDC knew about. I organized a little lunch-and-learn workshop through CDC's Geography and Geospatial Science Working Group, or GeoSWG. I talked generally about what these new GIS tools were and how they might be useful. I also found out about an Emory student group in the Emory MPH program called SORT, or the Student Outbreak Response Team. Once I learned about SORT, I sent an email to the student volunteers there and asked if they were maybe interested in learning about OpenStreetMap, and they were. So I also organized two training courses on that.