Fail Fest

Benjamin Hertfort, Research Associate - HeiGIT &
Sam Colchester, Senior Associate, Impact Partnerships - HOTOSM

Engaging 10,000 volunteers in a month - what can go wrong?

In early 2022 an organization with 10,000 volunteers engaged for a month using a humanitarian mapping application called MapSwipe. Employees competed to swipe through the most territory looking for populated areas. All went well until the middle of the month when huge amounts of low quality contributions started to come in. Hear from two members of the MapSwipe team to learn more about what went wrong.

Key takeaways: Learn what competition and leaderboards can do to volunteer behavior; Hear how tools can be made more robust to deal with ‘problematic’ volunteers; Learn what precautions might be needed when agreeing to massive volunteer opportunities.

Cornelia Scholz, GIS Technical Advisor - Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre

Mapping high-risk areas in OpenStreetMap in Sudan

This project focused on identifying and prioritizing high-risk areas (areas with people with exposure to flood, drought, conflict, displacement, and food insecurity) in Sudan and prioritize them for OSM mapping tasks. While the analysis and identification went very well and as planned, what was unexpected was the inaccessibility of up-to date satellite imagery needed to map the priority areas. This hurdle caused a 5-month delay in the project and turned into a big learning lesson on the importance of collaborations between different actors and organizations.

Cyber-attack on ICRC: facing a data breach in humanitarian action

In January 2022, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) determined that servers hosting personal data belonging to more than 515,000 people worldwide were hacked in a sophisticated cyber-attack. Victorien Hanché, Legal Adviser at the ICRC Data Protection Office, will discuss the Organisation’s experience and lessons learned in facing and handling this personal data breach.