How the Red Cross and digital volunteers are mapping Typhoon Haiyan to save lives

From a room in Moorgate, London, a team of three is working alongside a handful of volunteers to map the destruction caused by Typhoon Haiyan, the tropical cyclone that tore through the Philippines last week, claiming the lives of a suspected 2,500 people and displacing close to 700,000.

With the help of opensource data and a number of collaborative online tools, however, that small team is collaborating with international Red Cross teams and a staggering 746 digital volunteers that have, from their homes or cafes across the globe, made 1,751,278 changes to the OpenStreetMap (OSM) project.