Good day! I am Jake and this is my experience on OSM.

Online mapping was a concept that I have never heard of until this week. The office I am an intern in for two (2) weeks taught me about the basics of mapping. I would have never imagined people from all around the globe coming together to form such a great community. This community does public service in a sense because they input data into the website for other people to benefit from and use in their everyday lives.

The introduction to OSM was fairly simple. The website is designed in a neat and simple way which helped me begin mapping. The layout of the website is neat and the tutorial was really easy to understand. After learning the basics of mapping, it was time for me to actually map. I, along with my fellow interns, were tasked to map the buildings, roads, and any land use in our respective villages. This task was easy for me since some buildings in my village were already mapped/outlined.

After our introduction to OSM, we were then showed a website called HOT Tasking Manager. It is a website where people can collaborate in OSM to finish mapping tasks in certain areas. We were tasked to try the website out by mapping and validating. This part of my internship surprised me the most since I never expected people to collaborate through OSM to help the public gather data.

Bonus: We were also taught how to use field papers and smartphones to broaden our knowledge on mapping.

After these few days of mapping, I learned that OSM is a good way to help other people map out different parts of the world. I highly recommend that people try mapping because it is helpful and it is a great way to make a difference.