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Crowdsourcing

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Crowdsourcing, otherwise known as participatory mapping, has become a common and valuable tool for collecting detailed bottom-up data used to develop exposure data at a local scale as well as for validation of global scale geospatial information. It provides a rapid and low resource way to create fundamental data on infrastructure in an area and their associated physical, social and economic attributes. This approach, however, does have limits in both the type of data collected and the quality of that data. Communities and governments, who may not be trained technically in geography or disaster risk management, are largely the key players and the resulting outputs need to undergo significant curation before use for analysis. OpenStreetMap is one open data community that enables crowdsourcing parties to contribute and maintain data about roads, trails, cafés, railway stations, and much more, all over the world.

Photo credit: Teaser image, OpenDRI; Banner image, UNDP / CC BY-SA 3.0

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Open Data for Resilience Initiative (OpenDRI) Field Guide The Open Data for Resilience Initiative Field Guide highlights the experience and approaches of OpenDRI, including the use of tools such as GeoNode and crowdsourcing, and is aimed at practitioners considering how open data may support a DRM project. In Malawi, Citizens Get Involved as Innovative Technologies Help Them Better Understand and Manage Disaster Risks Remote villages in Malawi most vulnerable to floods and other natural recurring events are now better prepared to deal with disasters, thanks to a new mapping exercise which will share their data online...

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