Just a few hours after the 7.0 magnitude earthquake hit Haiti in January 2010, a group of collaborators from the OpenStreetMap community began collecting all sorts of topographical data about the country – roads, towns, hospitals, government buildings. Within forty-eight hours high-resolution satellite imagery taken after the earthquake became available, and within a month over 600 people had added information to OpenStreetMap of Haiti.
This online map quickly became the default basemap for a wide variety of responders – search and rescue teams, the United Nations, the World Bank, and humanitarian mapping organizations such as MapAction.
