Then we actually go out and we do the mapping. And when I say map, I mean every building, every sewer drain, every fire hydrant, every telephone pole, everything about that community that allows the Red Cross to be able to do our work. All of that data is super useful because we're in the business of reducing human suffering. And reducing human suffering is key because you have to look at that in different ways. It's not just the disaster happened and now we're trying to help people. A lot of times we're trying to help people before the disaster happens. That's where a lot of our mapping is targeted, we know something bad is going to happen. We can help people move out of a floodplain in Dar es Salaam, or we can help people build better structures in Tanzania so their health quality improves. We’re a little bit smarter when we use maps.

Do you feel like the world is a really small place with your job because of all the places you’ve seen?

We were joking about this in the office the other day: the world is actually a bigger place than we thought. Before joining the Red Cross, I backpacked through Europe. But now, after joining the Red Cross and doing these projects, seeing the sheer scale of what we have to do, the world is a humongous place. The world is a humongous place that is incredibly interconnected. I can talk to people in Botswana in five minutes, right? That's not a big deal. Actually helping people in Botswana is a much harder thing than making a Skype phone call or connecting them to the internet.

What’s a “Mapathon”?

Mapathons have many different names, sometimes it's “MappyHour”, that's actually one of my favorites. Sometimes there's “Mapternoon” where a whole bunch of people get together on Saturdays and map virtually from around the world. What happens at one of these events is that a group or an individual feels inspired to host a Mapathon and teach more people about how to do it. We have events where there's five people, we've had events where there's 250 people, and we've had events where there's 900 people! It's an event that can scale along with your Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi is the limiting factor, not chairs and tables, or volunteers for that matter. Because it's a great way to spend an hour, talking with your friends, eating some free pizza and learning about humanitarian work. You're not going to be the one that goes and gives somebody a shelter kit in the Philippines after a typhoon, but you can help map their community make it easier for the Red Cross.

I've mapped everywhere. Both using satellite imagery and actually physically being there. And then like you feel like you travel to these places. I feel like I know what South Sudan looks like even though I've never been to South Sudan. I know what the buildings and construction materials in Liberia look like because I've been staring at them for hours basically from space.

Where has this mapping been used in the past and how has it helped in these various situations?

Humanitarian mapping really dates back to 2004 with the Boxing Day Tsunami in the Indonesian Ocean. When that earthquake and then later tsunami hit, it took weeks for actual maps of any value to be made and for people. There's this very famous story of a gentleman deploying with a map that was 50 years old, the best map he had for Banda Aceh, Indonesia. Banda Aceh, Indonesia does not look like that anymore, nor had it in the last 20 years before the tsunami happened and 30 foot waves rolled over everything.

Fast forward to 2010, the Haiti earthquake, and now OpenStreetMap existed, (and) there was a bunch of people that were impassioned to do their little bit. The earthquake happened and immediately 600 volunteers from all around the world started mapping in Port-au-Prince. If you look at the early maps of Port-au-Prince, my favorite is in Google, at that time was just one line. Then very quickly the map filled out, in a little over a month or so, there was about a million and a half edits.