For almost eight months the OpenStreetMap (OSM) community has been collecting geo information for the West Africa Ebola outbreak response now. The collective work of the crowd is somewhat managed by the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT). For example, the Task Manager provided by HOT gives interested contributors information in which areas map features are needed. However, you can find additional information in an article by Pierre Beland, which he wrote during a conference where he presented the efforts of the OSM community. The OSM wiki contains some useful information about the West Africa Ebola Response too. Matt Irwin also wrote a summary about the OSM mapper contributions and created an interesting visualization of all the mapping work.

I created a response map for the OSM mapping activities in West Africa, a similar approach as I previously used for the “Typhoon Haiyan” deployment. It displays all OSM changesets created since March 1st, 2014. The analysis extent is displayed by a black rectangle. In total, more than 2,000 contributors made more than 10 million changes to the map. At the bottom you will find a time range slider which can control the displayed changesets. Sorry for the sometimes slow performance, but the community (maybe you too) collected a huge amount of data! The map is online here: http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/osm-ebola