I started my OSM journey as a YouthMapper with the University of Cape Coast YouthMapper chapter in 2016. It was very exciting and I loved every moment spent mapping projects on the tasking manager. This increased my zeal in wanting to become a cartographer :) , I can’t tell if it still holds now because I have grown to like the varieties in the mapping field…

Being a YouthMapper was a privilege because I got the chance to work on a project with OpenStreetMap Ghana through our late patron (Mr. James Eshun) which was also very exciting. The project was the Open Cities Africa, Accra Project which was sponsored by HOT. It was in the year 2018 I got to learn about Open Data Kit (ODK) and Open Mapping Kit (OMK). I also got to know about other open source mapping tools such as OSMAnd, OSM tracker and Maps.me. We did some remote mapping using JOSM and ID editor, mapping buildings, roads, POIs etc. and also went to the field to field validation.

After school I then joined OpenStreetMap Ghana as a volunteer and was privileged to be nominated to be part of the board members. As someone who loves to volunteer it was another opportunity for me to learn an also give back to the society.

For the love of contributing to OpenStreetMap, I had the opportunity to join the HOT Data Quality Internship(DQI) in 2020. There I learned more advanced ways of mapping using JOSM and other Open source tool such as QGIS. This sparked my interest in making sure data contributed was of good quality. I again joined DQI in 2021, it was an amazing encounter and another chance to learn about data quality and other open source tools such as OSGeo , Mapillary, Mapbox etc.

Although, I do not mapped as frequent as before, in order to keep myself in check, I joined OpenStreetMap Africa monthly mapathon where I get to map and validate mapathon tasks and also I go to the tasking manager to contribute to urgent projects.

My journey as an OSM mapper have been exciting but also challenging because not all tasks on project are easy to map or validate. In such situation you challenge yourself to critically analyze a particular feature before you map or validate because at the end it is the quality of the data you produce is what matters most.

Happy Mapping :)