Yesterday Fulcrum posted a blog highlighting the Community Health Maps program! Fulcrum has been a major part of teaching the CHM workflow for the last several years. The post gives a nice overview of some of the work that has been done in underserved and minority communities in the last several years.
Fulcrum Community
Last year Fulcrum rolled out a new service named Community. They describe it as a, "no cost, short term crowdsourced data collection solution for qualified humanitarian projects." It works like Fulcrum, but you need to apply for a license. The application form is short and is right on the Community home page. In the application you need to describe your purpose and how long you will be collecting data. You also need to provide a project description. If approved you can invite any number of data collectors via email to share your App (data collection form). It is generally aimed at humanitarian agencies, non-profits, or government agencies. They restrict commercial use of this service.
We used this last fall during King Tide data collection in Miami and it was a big success. In fact there are four main categories highlighted on the Fulcrum Community page: Hurricane, Tornado, Flood and Fire. If you click on Flood, the King Tide project is the first in the list. Clicking on it brings up a map with the data collected.
One caveat is that the data collected falls into the public domain and can be downloaded freely by anyone. This is possible because the data are anonymized, meaning any private information is scrubbed. The data remain available for viewing and download after the event ends.
It won't be appropriate unless there is some sort of disaster relief or environmental issue that demands it, but it is another tool to keep in your Community Health Maps toolkit!