I went to the OSCAL conference about Open Source software and OpenStreetMap in Tirana. It took me 3 years to finally decide to go ahead and do it and I had no idea what to expect when I arrived. But once I was there, I very quickly noticed that everything is perfectly fine and safe in the streets of Tirana. When I arrived at the conference I received a very warm welcome from the organisers who form a very active community in their local hackerspace. I was very happy that I could share some of my experience with OSM, OsmAND and Mapillary, and of course the PT_Assistant plugin. While walking between AirBNB and the venue, I tried to make as many pictures for Mapillary as I could, even on the bus to the airport: https://www.mapillary.com/map/im/k7CBwtE2S8quA5LUvfq19Q (They seem to need cycle highways there too, this guy is risking his life on the motorway)

I tried to get JOSM going on the computers in the classrooms, but that wasn’t a great success, as Java wasn’t installed on the Windows and the virtual machines with Ubuntu didn’t have enough memory to work very well. My plan now is to show the possibilities of JOSM and QGIS during Hangout sessions, maybe Hangout on Air. I never tried that before, but it should work quite well and it’s a great way to overcome the physical distance between us in the period between conferences :-)