HOT Research Topics

• Understanding contributor experiences, e.g., engaging and sustaining new members
• Training and education of contributors: e.g., in what ways can this be improved?
• Trace the impact of a mapathon
• Evaluating/understanding local community models and community growth
• Impact of UX on mapping activities
• HOT organizational study
• Quality control during emergency situations
• Legal issues in OSM: data & usage, collection in conflict situations
• Impact of the map on the lives of affected communities
• Understanding contributor progressions: how active are they? How quickly do they get up to speed? Etc (“business intelligence”)
• Policy recommendations: “lessons learned” for government agencies
• Validation and reputation mapping - Could HOT use the blockchain to improve the experience and credibility?
• Compare HOT with other open source projects. How have we evolved? what is different? How has HOT influenced the whole OSM project?
• HOT as a Digital Humanitarian project. Leading up to the World Humanitarian Summit, How has HOT contribution changed since Haiti and how might HOT learn from the consultations?
• How to better connect with communities around the globe?
• Geovisualization: mapping contributor information
• Geoinformation: measuring and evaluating geotagged content or entities
• Geolocation: measuring and evaluating accuracy of place names
• Crowdsourcing (or Volunteered Geographic Information - VGI): measuring and evaluating the merit and/or quality of collaboratively derived content such as geoinformation and geolocation
• Credibility: is VGI data trustworthy and accurate?
• Folksomies: examining the implications of "bottom-up" community derived and driven labeling or tagging systems
• Community based research/participatory design: implementing and evaluating techniques that utilize knowledge of local experts who are not necessarily training in research methods or design
• Volunteer Mapping Collaboration: mechanism to support the co-production of new knowledge, knowledge-building and progressive discourse (e.g. threaded message forum embedded in map)
• Decision making: how VGI content is used to aid decision makers/policy and/or in what ways can this be improved?
• Crisis mapping/disaster management
• Machine learning: using automated techniques for mapping of aerial imagery
• Open data in the context of HOT

If you want to study HOT then please also refer to our guide for HOT Academic Partnerships.