Building resilient communities with open source tools and open data

Fires. Floods. Earthquakes. Heatwaves. Hurricanes. Landslides.

Resilience has never been more important — or more urgent. The ability to adapt, act and spring back is essential. Knowing your neighborhood before an emergency hits can help save lives as well as reduce injuries and property damage.

Resiliency maps https://resiliencymaps.org/ outline possible hazards (construction sites, chemical hazards) and assets (shelters, cisterns, hospitals.) Until now, however, there were no maps with these features that are open and available offline. This session will talk about the journey to creating these maps with OpenStreetMap, open data, open source tools and some old-fashioned footwork. It will include best practices and lessons learned that can make this project useful for citizen mappers everywhere.

It started out as a community project in San Francisco, with a small group of volunteers using open source tools and open data to map the large, rapidly changing South of Market neighborhood with a view to the next earthquake.