Hi, I’m Tom. I thought I’d do a quick post to explain who I am and why I’m part of the OSM, Missing Maps and HOT communities.

I’ve always loved maps and geography, but I decided to go into engineering and I’m currently finishing off a PhD at Imperial College on reducing CO2 emissions from the cement industry. Not really anything to do with mapping…

During my undergrad, also at Imperial, I was involved in Engineers without Borders. I went to Tanzania in 2009 on a project with them to build rainwater harvesting systems. That project has now become its own charity (http://www.raincatcher.org.uk/). I was based in Kahama, Shinyanga province, and when I got there I asked if there was a map I could borrow while I was there, so I could find my way round. There were puzzled looks - why should there be a map of Kahama? I didn’t even start to explain the benefits…

Anyway, although I enjoyed my experience in Tanzania I came to the conclusion that perhaps I wasn’t the best-placed person to be out on the ground in Tanzania building such projects (I’m a chemical engineer, for a start). But when I found out about Missing Maps last year, I was very interested to find out more. So I went along to the next mapathon and really enjoyed myself (thanks in no small part to @RAytoun). I downloaded JOSM and looked at Kahama on OSM - there was nothing there! I started mapping Kahama using satellite imagery and most of the centre of the town is now mapped (apart from buildings).

At one of the missing maps sessions I got involved in putting information from field papers from Zimbabwe onto OSM. This work is quite a lot more complicated than drawing buildings or roads using the OSM Tasking Manager - there’s several websites involved, and we had to come up with a whole new addressing system for Epworth, the region we’re mapping. It’s been great fun and somehow I now lead the Epworth field mapping sessions at Missing Maps London’s mid-month mapathons. I’m not great at it, but at least I try. I’ll be speaking a bit more about this particular project in a future post…

As for my mapping interests, I’m generally most interested in mapping for development, especially in learning about how the maps can be used in innovative ways on the ground. Other things I find exciting are projects such as microtasking managers (e.g. http://crowdmap.geog.uni-heidelberg.de/app/missing_maps_follow_up/) and how we can improve the tasking manager to make field map information input less of a pain. I’ve got some ideas but I’d love to talk to you if you’ve got any ideas of your own! To be honest, I love talking, so feel free to talk to me about just about anything!