YouthMappers

We are a global community of learners and scholars who create and use open geographic data that directly address locally defined development challenges worldwide. Student-led chapters work locally and collaboratively across countries to help create resilient communities. Capitalizing on web-based open geospatial technologies, our mission is to cultivate a generation of young leaders to unite and exchange, in order to create resilient communities and to define their world by mapping it. Our work expressly links supply and demand for geospatial knowledge by addressing specific needs for geographic information to specific development objectives in targeted countries, creating new, quality, localized geospatial data in unmapped places of the world. This effort synergizes with and fills a unique niche among a growing set of actors related to volunteer humanitarian or crisis mapping, and to expand these efforts to also address longer term and chronic development needs around resilience. The new data created is open and accessible to the public using the OpenStreetMap platform under the hashtag #YouthMappers to ensure it is freely available for the greater public good, particularly local populations planning for the welfare and vitality of their own communities. The consortium also encourages that the open spatial data created will be used in meaningful research and analysis to directly address specific international development challenges. Students gain new skills and can also use this data in their own research in a great variety of studies on issues that lend themselves to be visualized through mapping. Supported by a grant from USAID.