My motivation for attending the conferences was to share the local perspective of open mapping communities and learn from other communities on how they uphold diversity, sustainability, and impact in solving challenges in their communities. I’m grateful to unSummit scholarships for covering all of my travel expenses so that I could participate in this global gathering! - It was worth it.

I was impressed to see and meet the diverse groups represented at the conference, as well as to see that the majority of grantees (both from Unsummit and FOSS4G grants) come from underrepresented communities, which made the conference more interesting - I met and connected with people from different corners of the world… Peru, Fiji, Brazil, Cape Verde, Jamaica, Guinea, Vietnam, and others who have different ideas about open mapping and how they use geodata to solve local community challenges.

SotM was incredible…there are so many applications for OSM data, and they vary greatly from north to south. SotM was also full of community talks and how OSM communities are leveraging data to solve problems in their communities: all of the talks that I attended were excellent, but my favorite was Florian’s talk titled “How to Kill OSM.” (https://2022.stateofthemap.org/sessions/A8JLUY/) - in my opinion, he had great ideas about OSM’s sustainability thinking.

FOSS4G - a more diverse participation, i.e. academia, developers, users, community, business people, and so on: sometimes I would reconsider approaching someone, worried that they would open their computers and run scripts to explain what they do - haha (you should know by now that I am not a technical person, I enjoy working with them though) - but I still enjoyed every minute of the conference with amazing workshops and talks.

Volunteering - To be honest, when I signed up as a volunteer at both conferences, I thought it would be a ‘trivial’ task, but I was wrong. It turned out to be an important part of making the conference a success and ensuring that participants enjoy the conference, knows who to ask what, when to be where, and so much more - I enjoyed my time volunteering and felt so useful at the conferences: also met and connected with a number of people in the process - totally worth it!

Informal gender and diversity discussion - in between talks and social events, I had the opportunity to discuss with others the issues of inclusion and diversity in open mapping spaces in order to gain more insights and see if we could include some in OpenMap Development Tanzania operations - I learned a lot from other communities, as well as how important this topic is globally.

It was wonderful to reconnect with people I met at FOSS4G and HOT Summit 2018 in Dar es Salaam, meet people in person who I had only communicated with virtually, meet other HOT voting members and make new connections.

Finally, I was able to tour various locations in Florence, enjoyed social events, food, and so on - the city is heaven!

Once again, many thanks to HOT unSummit for making all of this possible!

My Fijian friend, the best person ever!

Amazing team, I loved every bit of our interaction

Hint; I ordered avocado salad, got ‘everything’ in but avocado:)

A lovely view from room belvedere in Villa Vittoria