The MapScaping Podcast - GIS, Geospatial, Remote Sensing, earth observation and digital geography

Nadine Alameh is back — former CEO of the Open Geospatial Consortium, and now CEO and co-founder of Lunate AI, a six-month-old company sitting right at the messy intersection of geospatial and AI. In this conversation, Nadine breaks down the three types of clients she's seeing right now: government agencies standing at the edge of the river, wondering whether to jump in, startups from outside the geospatial world stumbling in with big ideas, and organizations that know they need to modernize but don't know who to call. We get into why the real value today is in experience and advisory rather than raw coding, why "moving up the stack" matters more than ever, and how AI agents are quietly reshaping everything — from how satellites get tasked to how dashboards (or whatever replaces them) get built. We also talk about the death of the one-size-fits-all dashboard, world models and simulations, why trust and guardrails are the actual hard work, and what it takes to go from a flashy proof-of-concept to something a bank can rely on every morning. If you're a GIS professional thinking about where to position yourself, a startup founder wandering into the geospatial world, or someone trying to figure out how AI fits into your workflows — this one's for you.

What happens when you put professional-grade aerial mapping in the hands of the people who actually live in the places being mapped? In this episode, I'm joined by Rebecca Firth, Executive Director of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) — a global community of around 750,000 people building free and open-source maps in the places that need them most. We dig into HOT's Drone Tasking Manager: a tool that lets local residents, using low-cost consumer drones, capture professional-quality aerial imagery of their own communities. Rebecca explains how it works under the hood, how dozens of pilots can coordinate to produce a single seamless mosaic, and the assumptions her team got wrong along the way — from over-engineered task locking to worrying about the wrong problems entirely. We also talk about what this looks like on the ground in Freetown, Sierra Leone, where the same drone imagery is now being used across seven city departments — for waste collection planning, disability access, flood mitigation, and soon, thermal mapping during heat waves to support local-led climate adaptation. If you care about mapping, drones, open data, or the simple idea that local people with local tools can solve problems faster than anyone flying in from outside — this one's for you.    Thank you to today's sponsor, Geo Business - Registration is free.