After some quite busy months with lots of work and engagements, I am happy to be able to finally share with you my experience at State of the Map 2019.

I was happy to attend SOTM2019 conference, which took place in Heidelberg, Germany. This was my first international conference. Before I start sharing with you my experience there, I would like to thank everyone involved with the organization of the event, the volunteers, the “OpenStreetMap Foundation” and everyone who helped on making State of the Map 2019 possible. I really appreciate being accepted as a scholar not only for SOTM’19 but for HOT Summit 2019 as well, since I had the chance to attend both events.

I’m a contributor of OpenStreetMap for almost one year now. I have a background in geoinformation and have always enjoyed working with maps. When I first learned on OpenStreetMap I was quite intrigued by the idea that I could contribute to improving local maps and all of my contributions would become visible and available for other people to use. So, first I was involved mostly by editing local maps, and also by co-hosting events in the city I live in. I had my first workshop on a openstreetmap related topic in May’19 at Open Source Conference Albania where I was happy to share with beginners what I had learned so far and help them get started as well. This was quite challenging for me since I didn’t have much experience with speaking in public, but everything went quite well and as a result I had enough confidence to fill my CFP application at the biggest gathering of the year of the OpenStreetMap contributors. And as you can guess, It got approved. :D

My topic at State of the Map 2019 was: “First steps with OpenStreetMap editors”, the reason why I decided to host this workshop was because I was new to the community so I thought that this would be a nice way to share my experience with beginners and try to engage them as well with OSM.

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Happy for my first edits in OSM. I added a few building in the city of Fier, Albania. I am planning to be very active now on and to get more involved with the OSM community.