I came to know about OSM from Aruna, she was a speaker at Swatantra’17 (International Conference on Free and Open Source Software) in India. Now she’s a close friend of mine :) After the conference we got connected through telegram.

I really wished to do FOSS contributions but didn’t know how! Glad that I met Aruna, the most patient and cheerful person I’ve met. She asked me to take the first step towards FOSS contributions by OSM tracking. I decided to work out this task with my cousins. We decided to go for an evening and take notes of shops nearby to add them to tracklists. We had fun. Following are some fun things that happened:

1) An old lady asked me to buy groceries from her shop in exchange for the information she shared. 2) A shopkeeper asked for an ID Card to confirm that my intention to take photo of the shop was not bad. 3) I even went for a scooty ride to track schools in the rural parts of my village :)