The 21st to 25th of November was the peak of my OSM journey in 2022. I was selected as one of the SOTMA Scholars to attend the event in Legazpi, Philippines. HOT Asia Pacific HUB was the one who invited me. From Indonesia, Zainab was also selected along with me and the other scholars that came from Nepal, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and Timor Leste.

This was actually my first time visiting the Philippines. I enjoyed so much stay in Legazpi. We visited the Mayon Volcano, tried various local culinary, and played amazing race games aside from attending many choices of talks and workshops at Bicol University (the venue where SOTMA 2022 was held)

It was wonderful to meet with the OSM community in Asia. We shared a lot of experiences, stories, and meaningful OSM journeys as that one is the one why we were at the event. I always remember every detail of the discussion I have made with almost all of the participants in the SOTMA 2022.

I do learn a lot from the event, but there are 2 most interesting topics that I really like which are AI and Counter Mapping. Machine Learning has already been applied to OSM since a couple of years ago, SOTMA was my first time connecting directly with the developer, programmer, and contributor who are the key person of some interesting tools regarding OSM and OpenMapping Tools combined with AI. It is used widely nowadays by OSM contributors. It helps a lot to enhance the data quality. The second topic I really like is Counter Mapping. This is a novel term in my country and currently, I have the opportunity to involve in a program that is relevant to this topic in Indonesia that is funded by Booster Grants. I am happy to know that OSM can be part of fighting an injustice issue in society.

Besides attending the talks and workshops, I was given by the organizer an opportunity to share my OSM mapping activity in Indonesia. Really grateful to be able to discuss with everyone about land use mapping in Indonesia. Hopefully, land use data in OSM will have significant enrichment for the next year.

OpenStreetMap Idea is really powerful to bring free and open spatial data to everyone while also involving individual and organized mappers at the same time. Asia mappers have a lot of work to do, we need to map more people, share our local knowledge, encourage new mappers and strictly take care of our data so everyone is grateful and proud of having such awesome spatial data. See ya at the next SOTM Asia !!

Btw lastly, I just want to say that meeting directly with OSM contributors was so exciting !!! they are all awesome people!!