Mapping Rural Communities with the Canadian Red Cross Missing Maps Pilot
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| Number of Parts | 70 | |
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| License | CC Attribution 3.0 Unported: You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor. | |
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State of the Map US 201937 / 70
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:00
Okay, so my name is Matthew Darwin. I'm a volunteer with the Canadian Red Cross. I started volunteering earlier this year but I've been mapping in Open Street Map for two and a half years now. So the Canadian Red Cross is really interested in one of the main things is disasters and planning
00:22
for preventing disasters, disaster response, as well as disaster recovery. Some of the things you kind of need for disaster planning are things like where are the people, where are the key infrastructure in your community, or where
00:41
are the things that you need to watch out for the hazards. So Canadian Red Cross is really involved in rural communities and that's where we're going to focus on in this presentation. So the Red Cross has been part of Missing Map since 2017 and as part of that it's really focused on, you know, completing
01:04
the map in Canada. So a lot of time we're talking about missing maps, we talk about Africa or some far-off place, but we have places in Canada which are kind of very similar. We have people and the map is blank, so we want to help fill that in. So a few projects that we're working on a disaster
01:24
response, so as I said, so if there's a tornado or a flood, getting the help to the people in need as quickly as possible. Building relationships with data in Canada, so there's lots of maps in Canada but maintained by lots of different people in lots of different formats including paper. So
01:44
building relationships with all those people and trying to bring all that together to build a story and then once we get those data and we try to convince people to make that data open so it can be used by anybody, but then showing stories back to the data providers on how we use their data so that we encourage them to continue to share. Indigenous communities in Canada
02:06
really would want to provide them training and resources so that they can build their own maps and they can tell their own stories in OpenStreetMap or other tools. And what I'm going to talk about for the rest of this presentation is really about mapping for first responders. So if you think, I
02:25
put a few screenshots of different parts of OSM in Canada. So I'm from Ottawa and if you look at it, it has quite a lot of detail. Somebody's drawing fences in backyards and things like that, but if you look at the bottom right corner, you know, there's just blank sections of map. So
02:43
the coverage in Canada is very inconsistent so the Red Cross is really focused on those rural blank areas. So here's a beautiful prairie intersection and if you notice there's a distinct lack of any road signs at this intersection. So if you're trying to do an emergency response here, how do
03:03
you really know where you are? Of course there might not be any cell phone coverage so, you know, live maps looking at that, that's not practical. And in fact it's not just maybe there's no road sign, in fact maybe the road doesn't even have a name. That's actually the case. So we have these weird, you know, descriptions of the land that you're on that you're from, you
03:22
know, 1,800 surveys or something. So one of the projects that we've done, which is completed, is in Saskatchewan where one of our Red Cross volunteers is also a volunteer firefighter and they said, well it would be great if we knew where all the little bodies of water are, but I'll call them ponds for the
03:43
sake of this discussion. So that, you know, if there's a fire then we know where the water sources are that we can bring to fight the fire. So we talked to some different communities, we used the task manager, we asked the volunteers, this is a remote mapping project, we didn't actually go on site,
04:02
but you know looking at the satellite images map the buildings, the driveways, driveways can be really long if you're in a prairie area, so that's important, as well as the the water bodies, which is obviously the important part here, and then lots of validation which I'll talk about in a second. So here's the results, lots of water, and this is the product that the
04:28
the fire department can use now. So you have the open street map base map and we didn't put those weird address things into OSM because that doesn't really make a whole lot of sense, but they can put that in as an overlay and then they can use it, they can search, and hopefully they'll at
04:42
least get a bit better response. So here's what some of those ponds look like. So obviously mapping that was a bit of a challenge in terms of which ones should we really map or not, and then since we had a lot of different mappers the validator role was to make sure that that data comes
05:00
consistent at the end. So obviously addressing is a challenge, if we actually had houses which had street addresses it would make things a lot easier, but we don't. So that's it, so I really look forward to having more collaboration between Canadian Red Cross and open street map in the future.