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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