ON MAY 9th, the day after the first cases of Ebola were confirmed in Bikoro, an urgent request came into the headquarters of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), an international charity. Maps of this part of the Democratic Republic of Congo were needed to deliver vaccines and medical help. Yet accurate ones did not exist.
MSF turned to the crowd for help. Volunteers, trained using an online tutorial, started analysing satellite pictures and drawing maps. About 450 volunteers have already managed to plot some 67,000 structures and 1,000km of roads in the area of the outbreak, completing in days a task that could have taken months. Some of these new maps (see above) are already in the field.
This is not the first time humanitarian organisations have turned to crowdsourcing to help gather data. When Ebola spread through parts of west Africa in 2014, more than 3,000 people around the world helped add some 16m features to maps of the affected area.
Crowdsourced mapping is also proving useful...Continue reading
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