HOT 2026 Q1 Tech Summary & Roadmap

Tech Into The Future

A lot has changed at HOT in the past few years.

HOT’s central mission is to address the development and humanitarian needs of people in vulnerable areas through open mapping.

HOT is building out an end-to-end mapping workflow that is an important component of this mission. The workflow includes local imagery collection (drone, camera imagery), AI assisted processing of that imagery, conducting field mapping and analyzing data for impact.

The user-friendly workflow is aimed at allowing anyone, especially those in vulnerable areas, to collect, access, and use map data.

End-To-End Mapping

A recent example of a blog covering end-to-end can be found here.

In summary, we need a solution to guide users through the many steps required to create digital map data from scratch:

1. Imagery collection: Drone Tasking Manager | OpenAerialMap
2. Remote mapping: Tasking Manager | fAIr
3. Field tagging: Field Tasking Manager | ChatMap
4. Data insights: Export Tool | uMap

That’s a lot of tools to build and maintain!

In addition to this, we have two ongoing overarching projects:

• HOT Portal: a single platform to unify all of the above tools, making for a simpler user experience. More details to come.
• Sustainable Infrastructure: migrating all of our software into a more sustainable and resilient infrastructure on Kubernetes

For more details, see an overview of our tech tools and the tech documentation site, including links to roadmaps.

Where Are We Now?

I’m hoping that this series of quarterly blogs will help to shed more light on where we are at delivering the end-to-end solution.

They should inform you about recently released features and future goals for each tool in our suite.

HOT Portal

• This platform will provide a unified place to access all of HOT’s tools.
• To make them more accessible, a goal of the Portal team is to ensure the same login is used across all of the tools listed below: login once; access any tool.
• The Portal website is about to be launched, and will include a summary of ongoing projects for each tool, in addition to a ‘My Data’ section to see projects you are involved with.

Drone Tasking Manager

• DroneTM is now a stable, widely used platform for planning, uploading, and processing drone imagery in real-world mapping campaigns.
• While the primary workflows are capable of collecting and processing imagery, many potential improvements have been identified throughout drone mapping campaigns, giving plenty of potential room for improvement into 2026.
• A major goal has been improvements to imagery upload and processing: faster uploads, fewer failures, resumable, and no requirement to divide images into task areas before uploading. The work will be released on the main website Feb/Mar 2026.
• A new team member within Tech will be pushing forward DroneTM significantly in the months to come - stay tuned.

OpenAerialMap

• A new STAC-based API was released at the end of 2025. While not widely advertised - due to the lack of a nice UI to utilize it - the API is available to developers and power users wishing to get an early start on usage.
• Going forward, HOT will be working on a new imagery uploader in 2026, in addition to running a new UI to easily visualize available imagery.

Tasking Manager

• In 2025, we worked on a significant upgrade to improve performance, stability, and future-proof the tool into the future.
• The primary goal has been to freeze the current capabilities of TM, then ensure the stability of the platform as it is now.
• The most recent feature to be added was the Super Mapper badge capability.
• We are also close to finalising the ability to map within a ‘sandbox’, so the data is not uploaded to OSM in sensitive contexts or private datasets.

fAIr

• While fAIr has had many improvements and model iterations over the years, a major shift in its approach is underway.
• Instead of HOT being primarily an AI-model generator, instead we will host fAIr as a platform to connect the geoAI community/developer/engineers with humanitarian open mapping community. This will make open GeoAI models usable by the open mapping community, without the need for tech/programming skills.
• We have also finalised work on fAIrSwipe: enabling users to validate fAIr generated features and push them to OSM within MapSwipe.
• A new team member in Tech will be pushing this forward into 2026, alongside the existing fAIr team.

Field Tasking Manager

• FieldTM has continually morphed in different directions since its prototyping in late 2023.
• After many rounds of user feedback and continual iteration, we have settled on a simpler approach to field mapping.
• The primary focus will be as a project creator in downstream field mapping tools (primarily QField and ODK Collect). The area can be divided up with FieldTM, but the task assignment and progress tracking will be handled in ODK or QField.
• Stay tuned for a major update in the coming months that will bring a simpler user interface and user experience.

ChatMap

• ChatMap has gone from success to success, culminating in a very effective response to Hurricane Melissa in 2025.
• A re-design is about to be launched in February, including an option to see live map updates as users send messages in the field.
• There will also be integration with other tools (e.g. ESRI), user accounts, new options for filtering content, and a feature for saving maps directly into ChatMap (uMap will now be optional).

Export Tool

• Export Tool is currently in a feature freeze stage, where no new active development is taking place.
• The website is still available and functional for those wishing to export OSM data.
• A review is being made of the underlying OSM data export capabilities, and if the tool could be simplified to ensure its longevity.

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