I am Ahasanul Hoque, working as GIS and Data Management consultant in Water Sanitation Program of World Bank Bangladesh. GIS is my passion and working with it nationally and internationally for long 10 years. During my Master’s Degree in Asian Institute of Technology, I got involved in OpenSource GIS. After coming back to Bangladesh GFDRR’s collaborative open city project gave me the chance to work actively with OpenStreetMap. Two year back, all of Bangladesh was almost BLANK in OSM. As a GIS geek and supporter of free and opensource projects I realized the huge potential of OSM in developing Bangladesh, a country with regular disaster threat, top listed for climate impacts.

I am a GIS guy, wanted to contribute to my country with my knowledge, so came back in motherland after finishing my higher degree in Abroad. I joined in job but was looking for opportunity to contribute to mankind then I got involved with OSM as well as humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team through Robert Soden and Jeff Hack. Thanks to them. I found this a noble work and started to disseminate this knowledge among people, started building a strong OSM community. I voluntarily facilitated a lot of OSM training and coordinated mapping parities(plz visit OSM Bangladesh facebook community page : https://www.facebook.com/groups/osmbd/) . I can see the wave now in Bangladesh. I am giving training to university students, teachers, non government organizations, local remote disaster response staffs, govenment organizations dealing public services etc. I have been spreading the opensource GIS knowledge every chance I get and I finally see the community waking up. I am not stopping, a lot more success story to share. And my journey continue….

Please read one of my interview here: http://blog.opencagedata.com/post/99749986348/country-profile-state-of-openstreetmap-in

And visit my professional blog: http://ahasanulhoque.com/category/blog/