At HOT’s ‘all staff meeting’ today, we held live finals of the 2021 HOT Staff OSM FIGHT Heavyweight Championship!

For those that don’t know, OSM Fight is a website that allows two OSM mappers to compete against each other based on a number of different metrics.

We had started a few weeks ago with team ‘group stages’ and then entered a knock out competition phase. Only the semi-final and final were left to play…

It was really fun and included pretend betting and ‘ringside’ interviews with the new champion, “Road Wrestler” ramyaragupathy and the defeated “Changeset Champion” clairedelune…

More importantly, it gave us a really good excuse to talk about aspects of OpenStreetMap that don’t come up that much in HOT, especially for staff without experience outside of remote mapping and / or humanitarian mapping…

For example, when interviewing the valiant loser, clairedelune, post-fight, we got to discuss what OSM notes are and how you can see them, add them, resolve them etc…

When interviewing our new heavyweight champion, ramyaragupathy, we asked her how she had mapped in so many different countries and it was a great excuse to talk about MapRoulette and how different tools support different types of contribution.

I have always really loved OSM Fight and this was an interesting and fun way to leverage it to help people explore different aspects of OSM… Highly recommended! (and thanks as always, Pascal Neis :D )