community

Our mappers of the month for March are Said Turksever and the entire OSM Türkiye community, for the invaluable coordination and mapping work done in the aftermath of the earthquake that hit Syria and Türkiye on the 6th of February 2023. We asked Said to tell us how the coordination was carried out and what were the main challenges faced.

Sajeevini Sivajothy is our Mapper of the month for February 2023. Sajeevini is a Geography student, passionate about GIS, at the Eastern University of Sri Lanka, Batticaloa, who contacted us a few months ago to organise a training course for students at her university. During the training, Sajeevini was very active and committed to the involvement of the participants. We asked her to tell us her story.

Charles Donkor is one of the trainees who actively participated in our recent "OSM and Humanitarian Mapping" training. During the evaluation of the homework required by the training, we discovered that Charles was doing a lot of mapping in his hometown and asked him to share his experience.

Ronald Ernesto Ontiveros Capurata, Ronald Ontiveros in OSM, is our mapper of the month for January. Ronald, a researcher in remote sensing and GIS based in Mexico, recently participated in the UN Maps workshop held at the Polytechnic University of Valencia. Since then, he has continued to contribute, trying to transmit his passion among his students and collaborators.

Lodz, Poland. On November 30, members of the OSM Polska Association, together with students of the Faculty of Geographical Sciences of the University of Lodz and supporters of the OpenStreetMap (OSM) project, for a total of 38 participants, met in the halls of the university to support the activities of UN Mappers and help them create maps of areas where United Nations humanitarian missions are carried out . Over the course of two and a half hours, the volunteers focused their efforts on mapping areas in a remote region of Somalia.

Last month, the UN Mappers team carried out a series of activities in the Valencian Community, Spain, with the dual purpose of raising awareness of the UN Maps universe and training participants in the use of OpenStreetMap open data. Two prestigious universities, Universidad Jaime I (UJI) in Castellón and Universidad Politécnica de Valencia (UPV), and secondary school students from the Entrenaranjos International School, were involved.

Frans Schutz, Frans S in OSM, is our mapper of the month for December. Frans is a retiree living in Hulst, the Netherlands, devoting his time to validating data, working to increase the quality of OSM, and helping new contributors improve their skills.

The State of The Map, the annual, global OpenStreetMap conference, held this year in Florence, was an opportunity to present the projects carried out in recent months and the results achieved so far, but it was also a time to meet the large community of mappers and to discuss and deepen with them topics such as the educational aspect. Let's take a look at a summary of what happened during those days!

Meet our mapper of the month for November. Włodzimierz Bartczak (Cristoffs in OSM) is a Polish mapper who actively participates in his country's OpenStreetMap community and has recently discovered UN Mappers. He is interested in tourism, cartography and new technologies.

Theresa Vieira, a retired project manager living in California, is the UN mapper of the month for October. Theresa, Tess2344 in OSM, has been contributing to UN Mappers' projects for over a year, making a valuable contribution in supporting peacekeeping missions. In mapping, she has found both a way to apply her technical skills and a way to support causes that matter to her.