[HOT] Project to map with refugees in the Dunkirk, France refugee camp

[Blake Girardot]

Hi all,

A few members of the HOT community (myself included) are going to spend 
2 weeks volunteering in the refugee camp in Dunkirk France (population 
~3000), generating a detailed, multilingual map of the camp in 
collaboration with some of the refugees currently in the camp and the 
Libraries without Borders NGO[1].

The resulting map data will be used by residents, humanitarian 
organizations and civil authorities to help improve the daily lives of 
the residents and the delivery of services and support to the camp.

The other major focus of the project is to teach OSM mapping to 
refugees. There might be no group of people who can benefit more from a 
collaborative map project than refugees far from their homes trying to 
find their way in unfamiliar and often hostile places. In addition, 
refugees have a great deal of unique and vital knowledge and skills to 
contribute to OSM and humanitarian mapping efforts that HOT engages in 
every day.

We expect this project to not only support refugees in the camp, but 
refugees in transit throughout Europe, as well as internally displaced 
persons in their native countries.

One of the major humanitarian organizations asked us to map the Calais, 
France camp. However, the majority of that camp was bulldozed before we 
could organize the project and so we are moving the project to the 
Dunkirk camp.

As I mentioned, this project is being done in collaboration with 
Libraries without Borders who are implementing one their incredible and 
empowering "Ideas Box" in the Dunkirk camp at the same time and that we 
will make use of during our training.

Like Katja's last project with refugees and maps in Calais France[2], we 
will be self-funding this and have started a crowdfunding campaign to 
cover our travel, lodging and some equipment to leave behind in the camp.

https://chuffed.org/project/a-map-for-dunkirk

Any support you can offer, including sharing this crowdfunding effort on 
your social networks, would be very very appreciated.

Regards,
Blake

[1] http://www.librarieswithoutborders.org/
[2] https://www.facebook.com/junglemapping