Volunteering with HOT
There are many different ways to volunteer with HOT, and anyone can get involved. To get started quickly, jump into a mapping project and contribute online.
Get in touch and talk to us
Join the conversation on Slack! A large number of volunteers and staff discuss mapping, emergencies, Working Groups and other matters on our Slack channel. Or you can join the same conversation on our Space (Beta) on Matrix, a modern open source and decentralized platform.
Mapping Volunteers
As a mapping volunteer, you can get involved with projects around the world, and contribute to humanitarian mapping through OpenStreetMap. Even if you are a new mapper, anyone can use a computer to create basemaps by drawing over buildings and roads, or use a phone to swipe and tap population hotspots in the MapSwipe app. If you have never mapped before and would like to help, visit the Tasking Manager’s Learn page to get started mapping in less than 30 minutes.
Please also join the discussion on Slack (see above).
Humanitarian and GIS Professionals
Are you a humanitarian or GIS professional? In addition to remote mapping, you can volunteer with HOT in other mapping related tasks. We could use help on data processing, validating remote mapping, or creating maps and other visualizations.
We also have opportunities to support field projects, both volunteer (remote) support and in the field. Job and volunteering opportunities will also be posted on the Jobs page.
Software Engineers
HOT builds and maintains over ten open source mapping tools. If you are a new or experienced software engineer, you can get involved in these open source projects. A good place to start is is looking for “Good First issues” under our product repositories on Github which serves as the coordinating place for technical activity across our tools.
All our projects are open source, and the code is on GitHub.