This year State of the Map international conference happenedin Aizu-Wakamatsu, Japan, on 18-20 of August. For the first time contributors from Albanian OSM comunity were part of the conference. Two of our members from the Open Labs Hackerspace, Anisa and Sidorela, participated the conference and held presentations.
A photo of Anisa and Sidorela during the conference
Anisa’s presentation was during the first day of the conference,in the main hall. She talked about “Building an OSM community”. Since OpenStreetmap is all about community, this topic had a lot of interest. Slides of her presentation can be found online here. A video of her talk can be found in this dedicated YouTube channel, among other SoTM presentations. To everyone that couldn’t join,here is an option to see what happened during those 3 days of conference .
Anisa during her presentation
Sidorela participated with a workshop about editing on OpenStreetMap. She presented two of the most used editors iD and JOSM, their pros and cons, differences and advanteges, trying to
share all the knowledge she gathered for monthscontributing on OpenStreetMap.
Sidorela during her presentation
There were almost 200 participants from 30 different countries, 38 volunteers and 48 speakers. The Presentations can be found here. Many diverse topics were discussed , such as community, map validation, importance of OSM data, humanitarian mapping, presentation of OSM related apps and many more. A conference with so much to learn from a very friendly community.
Girls where also part of Local Chapters meetup with many contributors from different communities around the world. They expressed the Albanian speaking OSM community wish to become a localchapter in the near future.
Beside all these, they had also the opportunity to join social events organized by the SoTM team. A visit to Tsuruga Castle was planned, a traditional dinner accompanied by traditional music,and for the first time in this edition OSM Awardswas organized. An award giving event as a reward for people that have contributed on OSM. Also during the last day they visited the city museum. It was an amazing conference, and we hope that more people from OSM albania community will have the chance to attend next SoTM, this time happening in Milan.
Few bits from the conference, yeah there is a short video here 🙂
Thank you very much OpenStreetMap Foundation!
A group photo with the participants of the conference
Shume faleminderit Silva