In this episode of the podcast I talk with Ivan Gayton, former mission head at Doctors Without Borders and currently obsessed with placing mapping technology in the hands of the developing world.

If you prefer the written word, you can see the transcript here.

Some highlights:

• How Ivan thinks about being fractionally responsible for saving the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, but pretty directly responsible for the killing of 12 (utilitarian deontologicalism, I think?).
• Why humanitarianism is a right and a duty, but development is merely nice (humanitarianism is countering the intervention of another human being).
• Casually devastating criticism of various international aid agencies (Tanzania is where aid workers go to retire while still drawing a check).
• Why accurate open maps are instrumental to humanitarian and development goals in developing countries (contact tracing during epidemics, aid distribution, municipal services, utilities)
• How you can contribute to mapping with money or programming talent (especially mobile, Unity or other 3D mapping engines, FPGA, AI, especially for vision, and blockchain). Programming positions are potentially paid, although not at competitive rates.

Links and other references:

• Ivan mentions starting his mapping project with Ping. This refers to Ka-Ping Yee, another former co-worker of mine.
• The organization Ivan works with most directly is Humanitarian Open Street Maps team.
• If you’re interested in working with him you can reach him at [firstname].[lastname]@hotosm.org.
• Missing Maps Project
• Ivan mentions a blog post with the title “Free Software is Racial Justice”. That can be found here.