Mapping for a Social Cause

Raul Krauthausen, SOZIALHELDEN e.V.

Details about the talk:
One year Wheelmap.org
1,6 Millionen people require a wheelchair in Germany. Worldwide, the number of wheelchair users is aroud 185 million. All of them want to participate in public life. The most important question for these people is: can I access this specific location?
wheelmap.org is an online map which is specialised on this question. Since September 2010 everyone can find these places and add them to the map. There are also shown places which are limited accessible or even not accessible, which is a crucial information for the users.
The map data come from OpenStreetMap and each new entry on wheelmap.org will become part of OpenStreetMap’s database. In addition to the website there is a free iPhone App available. More than 20.000 data sets could be collected since the launch. Some hundred new entries are being added each day.
On the one hand, wheelmap.org provides people with useful information for orientation. On the other hand, the project wants to motivate owners of locations to rethink and to work on their wheelchair suitability.
Wheelmap is a project initiated by SOZIALHELDEN, a young and creative group of change makers, which has developed a couple of social projects since 2004.
How does social mapping work? How to reach affected people to participate on OpenStreetMap? What are the challenges for NGO’s working with OpenStreetMap. This and some more will be part of the talk.

Details about the speaker:
Raul is a marketing specialist dedicated to solving social problems, and making solving social problems fun. As a child, he lived in both Germany and Colombia, where he witnessed many stark economic divides. With his own genetic bone disorder confining him to a wheelchair, he experienced the social divides facing people with disabilities.

Returning to Berlin, Raul early on dedicated his life to creating social change. He enrolled at the Berlin University of Arts where he studied design thinking and created an award campaign for the Alternative Nobel Price ("Right Livelihood Award.") Trained as a radio host, he later launched a call-in radio show for people in emotional distress, where he was confronted with poverty, abuse and loneliness in the dark niches of the welfare state.

Reacting to these social issues with a spirit of inclusiveness, participation and entrepreneurship, Raul co-founded the SOZIALHELDEN platform, a multi-award-winning group of extraordinary change makers, of which he is the creative mastermind. The group has a track record of creating successful, sustainable and well marketed social innovations, including “Pfandtastisch Helfen”, Germany's most prominent recycling for social change project. Raul always felt the need to empower people with impaired mobility and to get them better integrated into the very segregated German society. Having many experiences with the German welfare system himself he always wanted to give wheelchair drivers a tool at hand that makes them more independent and brings them closer together to support each other. While continuing to contribute to the SOZIALHELDEN, Raul therefore now fully concentrates on growing the wheelmap community.

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