On May 24, 2024, I led an “Introduction to OpenStreetMap (OSM)” training session at the Geography Department of the University of Laos in Vientiane. The session was organized with the help of Professor Sonnasack Phaipasith, who provided translation support and organized the venue and invited his students. We had 15 participants, all students of Geography - eight women and seven men.

This training was part of my assignment with the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team’s (HOT’s) Open Mapping Hub - Asia Pacific (AP Hub) Guru Fellowship program. The Guru Fellowship program is a program aiming to engage with and upskill OSM mappers to fully utilize their knowledge and experience in advancing the Open Mapping movement in the region. Within this Open Mapping Guru Fellowship program, I also organized a Happy Hours OSM mapping meetup in Vientiane as well as 2 online trainings about “Mapping Relations” and “Good practices of Tagging Names in OSM”.

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Getting to know OpenStreetMap (OSM)

I love maps. Since I was a kid, I was fascinated by the old atlases and maps I found in my grandfather’s drawers. I could spend hours learning about countries’ borders, historic events, and the world through those thematic and topographic pieces of art and science.

Circumstances had it that eventually I ended up with a Masters Degree in Geography, unleashed onto the professional world, trying to make some positive contributions, some might say, “to change the world”, on the beautiful island of Lombok, Indonesia.

I still remember, when back in 2008, my colleague showed me an article about a crazy project to make a free map of the world, basically by using GPS tracks as the main data source – high resolution satellite imagery as we know it now, was not yet accessible. Crazy idea, impossible, overambitious, were a few thoughts that popped up. Though, “why not give it a try” and add a few roads and places in my neighborhood. I don’t think those few edits made a big difference to OSM – but it thought me of how to use and contribute to OSM.

Becoming an OSM contributor

The following year I ended up living and working in the town of Putussibau, Kapus Hulu District. Take a dart, throw it somewhere onto the middle of a map of Borneo, the biggest Island in Indonesia, and if you slightly missed the exact middle a little bit to the north-west - that’s where I found myself. Surrounded by amazing nature, amid local Dayak, Iban, Punan and Malayu as well as other Indonesians who had moved there more recently from other parts of the archipelago, I was teaching GIS and conservation, mapping forests, customary boundaries and the manifestations of an increasing human footprint there – road infrastructure, oil palm plantations, gold mining areas and the like.

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