Update: Slides of the presentation are embedded below.

The monthly Geo DC meetup is tonight at 7:00 pm, and I’ll present on our work mapping the famine in the Horn of Africa with USAID. We’ve released several maps showing the extent of the famine and aid efforts happening in response to it, and are slated to release new ones today with updated data from USAID. Visualizing this data on a map makes it more consumable and usable for relief organizations working on the ground in Africa and more understandable for the general public. I’ll walk through these maps and give a sneak preview of a new one we’re working on that shows the number of refugees and people displaced by the famine.

Haley Van Dyck from USAID will join me to talk about how USAID is advocating for open data and what it can mean for the international community. Data transparency aids collaboration between relief workers and increases the spread of information — and that’s never more crucial than in a crisis situation like this with so many lives at stake. Haley will talk about some of the higher level thinking around open data at USAID, and I’ll talk specifically about the open data sets that power these maps.

The Geo DC meetup starts at 7:00 pm tonight (Wednesday, September 7) at Stetson’s, with presentations starting at 7:30 pm. There are some other great talks on the lineup, with Juan Marin Otero talking about the National Broadband Map, Joanne Tu Purtsezova talking about cartographic illustration, and Eric Carr talking about Geo-Django.

There’s also a a Crisis Mappers meetup happening next door at Local 16 from 6:00 to 8:00. We recommend checking that our first before coming to Geo DC to hear about this and other mapping projects and techniques.

Here are slides from my talk: