HOT Academic Partnerships

So you want to study the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team

That’s awesome! Here’s some ideas from us on how to be successful.

1 - Get to know us We’re pretty friendly to newcomers. You should take the time to participate in our Meetups, help out at a Mapathon, or join in our community IRC chats. If you haven’t edited in OpenStreetMap before, you should definitely sign up for an account and stop by LearnOSM or MapGive for a tutorial before heading over to the Tasking Manager and doing some mapping. All of this will help make your research better, we promise.

2 - Be clear from the start about what you’re up to As a show of respect, let us know that you’re studying HOT. Give us a sense of what your project is all about and where we can expect to see the results. The best way to do this is by sending a quick note to the HOT listserve.

3 - Let us help We like researchers; many of us are researchers or have some sort of university affiliation. If we know who you are and what you’re working on, we might even be able to point you towards relevant studies, get you access to data you might otherwise not know about, or connect you to people in the community who can help answer your questions. Again, an email to the listserve is a great way to start a conversation.

4 - Need research ideas? We’ve got research ideas There’s a lot of questions we have that you could help out with. Check out HOT Research Topics for the current list.

5 - Let us know about your findings We’re super interested to hear about what you find. When you publish your results, you should do it in an Open Access journal if you can and then send the link out to the HOT listserve. Even better would be to blog about your work, present it at OSM conferences, or put together useful visualizations. Taking some time to communicate your work to non-specialists in your field will dramatically increase its reach and impact.

6 - There are other ways to collaborate with HOT Besides your research, there’s a lot of other ways that folks with university connections can partner with HOT. Check out TeachOSM for ways to incorporate OpenStreetMap into your classes; partner with us on open source tools for analyzing OSM data like EPIC OSM, or make your data available to other researchers using tools like the Open Science Framework.