Contributing Advent 13: Haiyan Progress Video

Once in a while, the London OpenStreetMap group organises a hack weekend where a bunch of us hack on various different projects, such as the new design, project OSRM or using Food Hygiene Open Data to improve OpenStreetMap.

The last few that I have attended were always close to the end of the year, so I tend to use them to make my "year of edits" videos:

• 2010: https://vimeo.com/34406096

• 2011: https://vimeo.com/34404102

• 2012: https://vimeo.com/56374742

This year instead I focussed on creating a mapping party progress video for the great work that the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) has been doing for organising and mapping the destruction of Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines. There have been lots of media coverage but I wanted to show how much they have added in the two weeks since the thyphoon hit—and what better to do this then with a progress video.

I have made many videos before, mostly for mapping parties in London, but also for other areas, such as Burgos in Spain, and for the Carse of Gowrie. At first I wanted to make them for the large area around Tacloban but in the end it made more sense to just do a slightly smaller area:

I have used a slightly tweaked variant of my OSM progress software that you can find on GitHub: https://github.com/derickr/osm-progress — I'll soon clean up my changes and push them to the repository as well.