Hello everyone,

Greetings from Sri Lanka.

We are closing the HOT Sri Lanka Activation today. We are no longer
receiving requests for support from the Disaster Management Centre of Sri
Lanka (DMC) and the actual floodwaters have receded, meaning there is no
more immediate crisis to respond to.

This was a very successful activation. We’ve received many notes of
appreciation from our friends in the Sri Lankan government: I was thanked
in person today by the DMC’s Research and Technology Director and asked to
work with OSM data for assessing the strength of the DMC’s response. OSM
data was used to evaluate the impact of the floods and communicate it to
other government responders / the Sri Lankan press. I am working to secure
the release of some of the resulting maps so you all can see for
yourselves. I also expect that in the future HOT will be asked to support
disaster responses in Sri Lanka.

There’s a lot of thanks to go around for such a successful activation. My
co-leads Blake Girardot and Mikel Maron did a lot to make this activation
work smoothly, as did Russell Deffner, particularly in the early crazy
stages of the activation. The Mapbox team with Sajjad Anwar and Maning
Sambale, the Kathmandu Living Labs team with Megha Shrestha and a bunch of
mapathons (most notably Nimalika Fernando’s mapathon at SLIIT in Sri
Lanka, **in
the flood zone**) helped immensely to get tasks mapped and validated in the
early days. Finally thanks to Mapbox and the US Dept. of State for
providing us useful imagery during the response. We couldn't have done this
without them.

Most importantly, HOT volunteers from around the globe did what they did
best, mapping and validating a huge area at a really impressive pace. Thank
you so much to every one of you who contributed.

We may continue to post tasks related to future preparedness in and around
the flood zone as requested by the DMC. Because these will fall outside a
disaster event we will handle them outside an activation. Please contribute
when you can! The DMC has become quite a believer in OSM data and hopes to
use it more for preparedness purposes too.

Best,
Robert
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