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Vision

This page explains how fAIr is positioned and the direction it is heading. It is written for partners, contributors, and anyone trying to understand where the work fits.

Positioning

Geospatial data is increasingly generated by AI. Its usefulness depends on the quality of the underlying data and on human validation, which matters most in humanitarian and development contexts, where the most vulnerable places are also the most poorly mapped.

HOT has built open mapping tools and mapping networks since 2010, and develops fAIr together with those communities. In development since 2022, fAIr has taken shape as a platform where geo-AI models are discovered, trained, and validated by the communities who use them.

Where fAIr is today

As of 5 November 2026, fAIr work is recorded in 23 countries and fAIr has supported 3 activations for flood and earthquake response; see Milestones and What is fAIr.

Current initiatives

  • Community training data. fAIrSwipe and the Open Mapping Gurus program create open training data with community mappers; see Field projects and Datasets.
  • Crisis response. Prediction outputs are published as open data for flood and earthquake response; see Datasets.
  • Integrating open-source models. An open call brings existing open-source geo-AI models into fAIr, so the platform serves as a shared home for many models.

The structured plan is on the Roadmap.

The direction

fAIr is evolving into an open, shared collection of vetted geo-AI models, with the pipelines to keep improving them. It is part of HOT's open, community-driven mapping work, where the same effort that serves humanitarian response also produces open training data that others can reuse.