The first Mapping Party of Salvador (Bahia, Brazil) happened on the last Saturday. We walked for more than two hours on the city centre and after we went to a room where we spent all the afternoon editing the data on OpenStreetMap.

On the walk there was only four people. On the afternoon, more people came along. We took pictures and marked some POIs with OSMTracker app during the walk, but our main mapping tool was FieldPapers.

The mapping party was realized together with the Wikiday, a Wikipedia event. So we published a lot of photos on Wikimedia Commons, added coordinates to Wikipedia pages and wikipedia tags to OSM POIs.

Check this cool video recorded at the Mapping Party: http://youtu.be/M_9Ao83rrcg

Positive points:

• New contributors to OpenStreetMap and many answered questions of beginners;
• Although we haven’t mapped many POI’s, we fixed a lot of errors on names, directions, tracing and classification of streets.

What we can do better next time

• It’s not a good idea to map a crowded area on business hours, because it’s difficult to walk and take good pictures.
• The weather was very hot! Next time we should schedule the meeting to the evening;
• We should take more pictures and try to capture more information like traffic signals, house numbers, accessibility and surface of streets and sidewalks.

Thanks to Colivre, a Free (as in Freedom) Technologies Cooperative, for welcome us in its headquarters.

Before and after the Mapping Party: