I would like to take this opportunity to thank openstreetmap Africa for organinising this year`s state of the map Africa. Before I go further, let me introduce myself here https://mapuganda.org/morish.html.

During this three day conference, I learned allot. The interesting session for me was mappathon where I was able to contribute to the openstreetmap through mapping and I learned new advanced josm tricks which makes mapping easier.

Networking during the conference was amazing. connecting to fellow mappers around Africa was something unforgetable to me. though time was not enough.

The lession that I learned from the conference will help me to improve my mapping skills and I will apply some of the ideas that I got from SOTMA to my community for development purpose.

My challage during SOTMA was lack of enough data which made me not to attend all the sessions but I am hoping to watch them on youtube once they are uploaded. The amazing session was the least but not last one which was SOTMA after party where I learned new dance steps from enock, shamillah, geoffrey and sharon who were outstanding and thank to Dj Angela. The session was full of jokes and I believe it was a session with the highest number of chats.

Many thanks to all the 75 speakers and organisers for making SOTMA colorful.

Knowledge sharing has a great power to change our communities and perspectives we have on different issues that affect us day by day. The State of the Map Africa virtual conference was just what we needed Malawi and Africa at large. Sometimes we may have helpful knowledge and skills, but sharing is far more important.

During the conference, Christine Mhone showed us how the knowledge and skills in mapping is very important in health, environment and risk and disaster management. Considering the state of Malawi’s health care and out vulnerability to climate change related disasters, indeed mapping can help in relief, search and rescue as well as post disaster activities such as tracking household affected and relief items delivery, through among others monitoring conditions of roads in the affected areas.

Innovations are also more important and encouraged in mapping. I took inspiration from the developer of Maproitette. This is making a visible difference to the communities we live and the world at large and I’ve been inspired a lot during the conference.

There is a great need to make people aware of the impotence of mapping as well as knowledge sharing as vulnerability of one location affects us all in one way or another.

We all have different stories and reasons to do open street mapping and the talk by Willy Franck on how OSM changed his life, we all can learn a lot from his experience and this should help us make positive impacts in our communities.

The speech by Monica Nthiga on technological development and improvements within the OSM communities was insightful and learnt a lot from her.

A big thank you have to go the organisers and moderators, all participants and all who spoke during the conference. I have gained more knowledge through attending the conference and I am looking forward to more of the same in the near future. Thank you all.

In preparation for Online conferences, I have always preferred to reserve a particular space equipped enough to participate during the conference. I must say due to lectures and other academic calls, I didn’t prepare such an environment to attend this conference. In spite of all, I had quality time to join in at some scheduled talk sessions and networking sessions with participants from other parts of the world.

One of the talk sessions I learned most was a talk on “Community mapping to improve flood preparation in Nigeria” which was facilitated by Shamilah. The talk exposed the different most flooded areas affecting communities and it also presented a solution by using mapped buildings, roads, and water areas edits on Open Street Map. The facilitator also recommended other solutions that could solve the flooding problems.

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Joining into the State Of The Map Africa was a great privilege for me as I was able to listen to great minds, scholars, experts, innovative & inspiring individuals. I started by listening to the lessons learned from a building footprints import. This opened my mind and I got exposed to things I didn’t imagine like the mention of AI generated buildings. I loved this and hoped to also learn how it’s done. The sessions were colorful as Laura Mugeha, the moderator was jolly and cheerful. The keynote Speech by Monica Nthiga in Room I was an insightful one as she mentioned of the Technological developments & improvements within the OSM communities. I got informed about how data has been collected by Crowd Sourced Data Gathering, this was new to me, I only new the Hot Tasking Manager, she managed to address the gaps & challenges. Brought up the point of not everyone is online so people don’t understand how OSM works. I learnt about the detailed data life Cycle steps that are categorized as preprocessing, Exploration and Maintenance. I am glad the I participated and also contributed to Map Ghana. Through this Mapathon, I was able to interact, learn from others as well as guide new beginners on the use of the editors specifically JOSM. I was able to network and collaborate while contributing data to OSM. Thanks to the organizers for the mind blowing event

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This year State of The Map Africa Conference(virtual) was a unique one. The Talks, Sessions Presentations were all inspiring. The Talks that wept me off my feet was that of which Willy Franck presented. Titled”How OSM Changed My Life”. He has developed an app/software so to say that could place everyone on the map. With it, be it a carpenter, the hairstylist etc will be on the map ( locations & attributes are very important In mapping) Indeed, his work is really without leaving anyone behind.

This is not new, a lot have been said too - https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2021-April/086458.html

Yes, several ##hashtags for Changest comments is very bad and not helping human.

Looking around Ghana and seeing especially new mappers whose first point of contact to OpenStreetMap is via some kind HOTOSM Tasking Manager instance activity / project, carry on this hashtag way of changeset comments to their individual contributions IMHO is not a good sign of building a good project, community and future.

It could be that some of them are not aware of it or think it’s cool to use ONLY hashtags as a changeset comment. Please, if you don’t know, It doesn’t tell anything useful.

This is why I now leave comments on such changesets in Ghana to draw mappers attention, I hope this little efforts convinces someone.

I recommend you read: osm.wiki/Good_changeset_comments and always use a descriptive text that can help yourself and everyone tell what actually happened in a changeset in the future.

If you are a trainer, catch them young!

Happy mapping!

Bye!

Being a new mapper with literally zero experience in mapping,the conference was a much needed experience for me and I managed to learn one thing I least expected was realising that mapping was not all about mapping but could also the open streetmap could be involved in the change of the country thorough intetiatives like Mapping in GBV and also Mapping in covid

This was a conference through was doing exams had to sacrifice a few hours here and there to be able to catch up with the detailed insight in what meets the eye other than the fixed perception of mapping .

Therefore mapping shouldn’t be all about mapping new areas but also a way of being a drive factor for a better Uganda, Africa and the world at large .

I want to extend my gratitude to the organisers for the work well done and successfully organising the conference. I found several interesting talks at this year’s conference but the one that intrigued me most is: ‘Planning with us, not for us: Community informal settlement mapping’ a panel discussion by Pete Masters, Florian Marembo, Lucy Fondo and Alessandra Figueiredo. The stories shared by the panelists including successes, challenges and lessons learned has enlightened me further in understanding the role OSM data has in supporting a desirable change for people living in informal settlements. I expect to use the knowledge gained in improving our work in the informal settlements of Kampala.

Today I attended day two of the training hosted by UN Mappers in conjunction with key to the city YouthMappers. During the training, Severin introduced us to mapping with JOSM, plugins, extrude tools, HOT Task manager, etc. Mapping with JOSM is more fun and easier than the ID Editor. JOSM offers a lot more freedom and flexibility than the ID Editor. It also provides more tools to help with accuracy. The building plugin automatically ensures that building edges are square. It also provides the option of having a reference to align other buildings, a feature that is not available in the ID Editor. The extrude tool makes it possible to accurately and efficiently delineate buildings with complex edges. As part of the training, Severin tasked us with mapping areas in our locality which we did with JOSM to practicalize what we learned. I found JOSM intuitive and easier to use, and I was a lot more productive compared to using the ID Editor. Tomorrow, the UN Mappers is hosting a mapathon which I intend to take part in, and I am sure I will have a lot of fun mapping with JOSM.

As a young researcher and recent graduate (2020) at Sokoine university of agriculture, it was an honor to present and showcase our field project program for Solomon Mahlangu College of Science an Education (SMCoSE) YouthMappers during state of the map Africa 2021(19th -21st November 2021). It was a great experience considering it was my first time on such huge platform with a lot of experienced organizations in OpenStreetMap (OSM) community. Nevertheless we should always take advantage of such opportunities to hear and learn from others, it is from such courage youth especially at universities can develop skills which will help them shape their career goals.

(Before the event)

From the call for participation, I was able to submit our work which was accepted by the state of the map team, it was a great feeling to know that as YouthMappers we could also contribute to ideas which speaks for the challenges and solutions in our communities. Preparations towards the conference was another experience which introduced me on how to prepare online presentations and also interact virtually with organizers. It taught me how to be punctual in responding to emails and properly plan on how to prepare pitches and presentations from various sources and mentors.

During the event.

Lesson learnt 1

https://twitter.com/Crowd2Map/status/1463873169618522123?t=OfpGgqBXHmfbSxEHFtrHJg&s=19 Local communities especially in rural areas including marginalized groups need also to understand these open source tools which have proved to be cost effective and reliable in addressing challenges in several sectors. From the presentation from Janet chapman, these groups are called digital champions. As organizations and groups in OSM, we should cultivate many digital champions, and from this we invest our efforts to the right people.

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Good evening, my name is Adéline DOSSOU from Benin. I have come here to thank you for the organisation of the conference which lasted three days, it was well organised and I would also like to thank all those who presented projects, in particular Nathalie SIDIBE from Mali, and many others. My congratulations to you. My question is this: What methods and means implemented for the evolution of Openstreetmap Benin?

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It was 19th-21st when a wonderful conference called State of the Map Africa took place. Where the main purpose is to bring together all participants in the field of mapping all over the world to discuss challenges, learn, and after all to have fun. First I would like to thank everyone who took part to make this conference successful and memorable events, starting from our organizer, volunteers, presenter as well all participants. Many thanks to our partners who help this event with money as we all know that one of the challenges that hinder mapping activities is expensive of the data and unstable internet. I am sure without your support some of us did not manage to participate in this wonderful!!! events. Indeed, it was a nice place to be and the proof has been given that mapping can answer any question and it applies in all fields. For example, one of the presenters Christine Mhone from Malawi proof that the knowledge and skills of mapping can be useful to the department of health, environment even the department of disaster risk management. Not only in Malawi but also in Nigeria where they use Mapping data in preparation and response in disaster response. More interesting thing is that in this field I have leant that we have all kinds of people with various talent that makes this field more admirable like software developers like Martijn who develop Maproutette which I started using soon after the conference indeed it makes my mapping activities easier. I also learned more about OSM data and the reasons why it is important to keep mapping, open-source software that we can use in the field of mapping just to mention few. Once more I would like to give respect to our organizers who tried their level best to make this event successful despite the pressure of the Covid 19 Pandemic. Thank you very much.

From 19th to 21st of November 2021, I attended the most mind blowing event, #State of the Map Africa 2021#. It was really an insightful event for me that did not only advance my mapping skills, but also the presentations and experiences that were shared through out the event encouraged me to continuously support communities by actively participating in mapping activities. I was impressed to learn about the number of approaches that can be adopted in growing the OSM community namely: Mapathons, workshops, webinars, training rural communities that do not have access to digital mobile devices, applying for micro grants as well as attending conferences, so as to also contribute in addressing most of the problems that are affecting more vulnerable communities today.

Ssekitoleko Derick was inspired by fellow mapper Kaluba Micheal during State of Map Africa 2021 last week in his session he talked about joining Youth mapper Chapter when he was still studying at University but what interested me most he was not a student of GIS or Geography but he has been able to learn how to use Mapping tools to contribute to OpenStreetMap and he has accomplished many things and on top of that he was selected among 10 top mappers. He also mentioned that he received a grant to travel to Tanzania were he was able to learn more techincs in mapping. As a person who never had a chance to attend University I was always thinking that to be a good map I have to obtain a degree in either GIS or other related course. That inferiority always had a negative impact on me while mapping or applying to any opportunity in mapping but Kaluba Micheal has proved me that I don’t need a degree in GIS to be perfect in mapping I just need to concentrate and learn how to use mapping tools, I can be a great mapper and I can contribute and help my community as he is doing in his community.

The “State of the Map” online conference held from November 19 to 21, 2021 was full of learning and sharing experiences. This conference, which takes place every two years, brought together the OSM community, experts in the field of geospatial data and each actor presented innovative geospatial solutions, the importance of humanitarian data and collaborative approaches in the implementation of local initiatives. Moreover this event hosted the monthly Mapathon organized by OSM Africa where I was Speaker in the Francophone Session. I had the opportunity to attend some excellent presentations with a diverse panel, however I would like to focus on the presentations that impressed me the most and that are in line with my professional orientations and perspectives.

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Hallo, liebe Mitnutzer

ich habe gerade erst diese Blogfunktion entdeckt und möchte Sie mal ausprobieren.

On November 21, 2021. I completed three intense and joyful days of virtual attendance to the State of Map Africa Conference 2021. First and foremost, I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to the organisers for thinking outside the box and planning this successful event despite the world being stressed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Thank you to all of the organisers, volunteers, presenters, and attendees for making the event a success.

Three days for the whole virtual conference was plenty in terms of internet data; my deepest gratitude goes to the conference organisers and sponsors for awarding me and other scholarship recipients to attend. For many of us, the data scholarship was a game-changer, as internet costs are still extremely costly and unaffordable in many African countries.

Apart from bringing together GIS experts from around the world, the conference served as an important learning opportunity for all of us with an interest in GIS who, despite not being experts, have found careers using GIS and OSM tools, which we use daily to solve the most pressing social problems, particularly humanitarians issues.

This year’s conference was unique in that it included a wide range of topics and industries from which presentations were given, allowing for cross-pollination among participants from a learning perspective to collaboratively solve human problems. Furthermore, the conference was extremely beneficial to new mappers like me, as I learned about and was taught how to utilise other OSM tools that are effective in mapping through various presentations. Claire’s demonstration of Street Complete, Map Roulett, and OSMOSE was like exposing a new baby to the sun for the first time! I just finished filling Waoo!

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Alongside other participants from the University of Lagos, I attended day 1 of a series of 3-hour training organized by the UN Mappers in conjunction with Key to the city YouthMappers. Severin Menard anchored the session and in the session, he gave an introduction to the OSM platform, expatiated on how the UN is making use of OSM data in her peacekeeping missions, how people can get involved and contribute to the OSM platform, HOT Task Manager, contributions of the UN Mappers over the years, mapping using ID Editor, Quality and use of OSM data, etc I really enjoyed the training session, and I am looking forward to day two tomorrow.

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