Online Volunteers Map Philippines After Typhoon Haiyan

Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team coordinates mapping effort after enormous storm devastated country

More than 700 volunteers have collaborated to provide rescue workers with high quality maps of areas in the Philippines hit by typhoon Haiyan.

Working on OpenStreetMap, a collaboratively created map of the world – like Wikipedia, but for cartographers – the volunteers have made over 1.5m changes, providing information for humanitarian aid workers on the ground and updating maps to reflect damage from the storm.

The work is co-ordinated by the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT), a volunteer group which lets disaster relief workers set tasks for mapmakers at home. Users who want to help out can log-in to the tasking manager, where they are presented with a list of requests from the team.