I am happy to receive the HOT Open Summit scholarship to attend the State of the Map 2024 held in Kenya. I can give a lecture on-site. But unfortunately, I got influenza and felt very ill during my trip to Kenya. Most of the time I have to stay in bed. So sad I can’t join the meeting during the conference.

(Photo credit: Arnalie)

I had to skip the first day of the conference in the first day due to illness. But I feel better the second day. The conference was held in the hall in Nairobi Tower, University of Nairobi, which is quite comfortable for all of us attendees. This is my third State of the Map, the second time in person.

It seems that the conference was held in Africa and quite a distance from most of the OpenStreetMap contributors. There is a much smaller size compared to other years’ State of the Map conference. It is still a very valuable experience. Face-to-face communication is still the most effective way to communicate between OpenStreetMap contributors.

I have reached a milestone: I met all major OpenStreetMap editors’ developers. This time I met the developer behind Go Map!!. He said he had email communication with the heavy Taiwanese Go Map!! user yellowsoer. And his wife is a Taiwanese. We talked during the second day night’s party, and compared how many animals we had encountered during our safari trip. We have arranged to have a meeting during their visit to Taiwan.

For my talk, I shared my experience of importing address nodes in Taiwan. During the talk, I mentioned what the Taiwanese community is working on. One of the attendees asked me about how to syndicate new and old address datasets. I told him honestly that we haven’t had any system way to deal with the syndicate issue. If there are wrong data, we just fit it, following the OpenStreetMap rules.

Map Kibera is an early example of OpenStreetmap, which emphasizes the unofficial part of OpenStreetMap, and a pre-project before the forming of HOT. Kibera is a slum in Nairobi, and most of the commercial and official maps have no interest in anointing the place. After 15 years, we have the chance to review what Map Kibera has done. An obvious thing is, you have to own a GPS device to record paths, but now there are so many tools available. The unchanged stuff is, that we still need people organized and participant

I also attended the Strava session, sharing how they analyzed the GPS track they aggregated. And Taichi Furuhashi’s talk is about smart cities.

▲ Strava session analysis GPS track by users.

I admitted I felt ill during the State of the Map conference. not possible to do the volunteer task that I should do. I am looking forward to the Wikimania 2025 in Kenya, perhaps that will be held in the same venue at the University of Nairobi, more people attend and might have the chance to come.