How HOT Is Rethinking Drone Mapping

What happens when you put professional-grade aerial mapping in the hands of the people who actually live in the places being mapped?

In this episode, I'm joined by Rebecca Firth, Executive Director of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) — a global community of around 750,000 people building free and open-source maps in the places that need them most.

We dig into HOT's Drone Tasking Manager: a tool that lets local residents, using low-cost consumer drones, capture professional-quality aerial imagery of their own communities. Rebecca explains how it works under the hood, how dozens of pilots can coordinate to produce a single seamless mosaic, and the assumptions her team got wrong along the way — from over-engineered task locking to worrying about the wrong problems entirely.

We also talk about what this looks like on the ground in Freetown, Sierra Leone, where the same drone imagery is now being used across seven city departments — for waste collection planning, disability access, flood mitigation, and soon, thermal mapping during heat waves to support local-led climate adaptation.

If you care about mapping, drones, open data, or the simple idea that local people with local tools can solve problems faster than anyone flying in from outside — this one's for you.

 

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