I had always wanted to try out OSM since I first heard of it, but never found the time to get started. Now I used the opportunity and took my Laptop, GPS-Receiver and assorted cables with me on vacation to the up to then basically unmapped island of Pantelleria. OSM had up to then the coastline, a place marker for the main village and the two radio beacons at the airport.

During my eleven days on the island I took a walk in the village in the morning and again in the afternoon, writing down street names, directions of one way streets and stuff like that in a small (paper) notebook and spent some time before lunch and in the evening to draw maps from the GPS logs, using JOSM for that.

After two days of trying I found it no longer hard to use JOSM, but fought a while with what seems like a server bug at that time that prevented the upload of delete operations.

One day I had someone give me a ride around the island, so I could see (and map) a bit more than just the main village; and I took a GPS Log on the way to the airport on my way back. I also took a few photos of the harbor area from the plane.

After returning home, I installed the WMS extension in JOSM and used Landsat images to add the airport runways and the shape of the small lake (by the way, is there a tag for a lake fed exclusively by hot springs?) and used my own photos to fix up a bit more of the coastline in the harbor area.

All in all I spent about two weeks of very relaxed work on the map of that island, learning how to transfer GPS logs from the receiver to my Laptop and how to work with JOSM in the process. Main obstacles were a) I don't speak Italian and most people there don't speak anything else, so I could not simple ask people what the name of a street was when I could not find a sign with a street name, b) not finding a bicycle that could cope with my weight, so there where a few streets that I didn't find the time to take GPS logs of. I marked these streets as stubs, hoping someone might complete them eventually.

I talked to the few people that did speak some english about what I was doing there in the hope of generating some interest locally in joining the project, but without much success I'm afraid.