My experience at YouthMappers Workshop, State of the Map (SotM 2022) and Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G 2022) in Florence Italy from August 18-28 2022.

“YouthMappers is the best, always bringing students, professionals, and industries together”

Actually, this is going to be my first international conference out of Africa it was an amazing conference, and I had the opportunity to meet with different people all over the world. Attending a workshop and two different conferences, I will say it is the best so far.

During the workshop sessions and conference, different organizations hosted additional events, such as HOT unSummit at SotM, HOT unSummit Social in the evening, and YouthMappers Documentary Premiere which was insightful and emotional.

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I was part of the volunteers in the SOTM preparation for the virtual conferences, I have always preferred to reserve a particular space equipped enough to participate during the conference. I must say due to traveling and preparing for Africa GIS conference calls, I didn’t prepare such an environment to attend this conference but I used any of the opportunity I have to attend. In spite of all, I had quality time to join in at some scheduled talk sessions and networking sessions with participants from other parts of the world at large.

One of the amazing talk sessions I learned most was a talk on “Community mapping to improve flood preparation in Nigeria” which was facilitated by Sharmila because in some areas in Nigeria are facings water challenge and other areas are facing water scarcity. The talk exposed the different most flooded areas affecting communities and it also presented a solution by using mapped buildings, roads, and water areas edits on OpenStreetMap. The two areas stated earlier must solve both challenge simultaneously. The facilitator also recommended other solutions that could solve the flooding problems.

During the event, I networked with GUY a member of OpenStreetMap in. Cote d’Ivoire and the interesting part was that we meet at Africa GIS conference in person such an amazing network session to talk more and take pictures together. We discussed the SOTM conference, talk about his country shared our experience in contributing to OSM, and also exchanged contacts. At the Network break session, I also had a call with Becky Chandiru, who was one of the facilitators during the HOTOSM Data quality internship 2020. We made use of the period to connect well enough and shared some ideas with each other.

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