Open Street Map "Mapping Workshop"
I conducted a workshop titled "OpenStreetMap Mapping Workshop" on Wednesday, May 13, 2015 at Phandeeyar. The workshop was attended by 20 enthusiasts. This involved organisations that work on resource issues, mostly on land grabbing, a start-up company that is planning to offer location-based local news feeds, a representative of MIDO, and an organisation that sells children’s books.
The participants had basic background knowledge of maps, which allowed us to directly get into the discussion of the OpenStreetMap project, Java OpenStreetMap Editor, and Field Papers. After the initial discussion, the participants got into three groups — one of which stayed indoors and used the online editor to contribute to OSM, one group went out to map the area using their phones (locations were saved on their phone and uploaded to OSM when they came back), and the last group went out to map the area using Field Papers. Connectivity problems made it challenging some of the groups to upload their data, but overall everyone took part in collecting geo-data and contributing it to OSM. The workshop simultaneously involved training trainers at Phandeeyar for future OSM workshops.
Author
Sumandro Chattapadhyay
As a Director at CIS, I co-lead the researchers@work programme, and engage with academic and policy research on data governance and digital economy. I can be reached at sumandro[at]cis-india[dot]org.
