This year I was privileged to attend my first SOTM global in Heidelberg Germany. I was granted a scholarship to attend the conference that helped me to be able to travel from Madagascar to Germany.

Before, I had attended State of the Map Africa in Kampala Uganda in 2017. It was the first international conference I have assisted. SOTM Africa had allowed me to meet new people and create a network. So I was very excited to attend SOTM 2019.

OSMF Support

I would like to say thanks to all SOTM organizers for their work. Then Dorothea Kazazi for her accompaniment during the travel preparation. She did awesome work for all of us to make sure that we got visas, the accommodation, the flights and the train tickets.

The travel guide was so helpful to travel from Frankfurt to Heidelberg.

New knowledge acquired

The scholarship provided us an entry not only at SOTM but at HOT summit also. The 5 days of the workshop and conference were all interesting. It almost became a challenge for me to decide which one I’m going to.

There are some sessions that I attended and I would like to share:

• Hands On Experience Extracting Meaningful OSM Data by Using Amazon Athena with AWS Public Datasets, you can see here
• Using Machine Learning to Improve Humanitarian Action, slide
• Spatial Indexes for OSM in PostGIS, here
• The Academic and Mapping Communities in OSM, here
• Share Edits and Insights with the Overpass Tools, here

I also learned about OSM activity around the world during the “Scholar Lightning Talks” and the “Bilingual Breakout Session” in which I had an opportunity to present OSM Madagascar.

Meet and Reunion people

SOTM was the way to meet new people and reunite with old friends.

It was awesome and fun meeting many people who I knew virtually from my social networks such as Twitter and Whatsapp Group for OSM Africa.

I also met many people who do wonderful work and share with them my experience.

It is so funny how OSM makes the world very small. For each person I met, we have at least another one person who we know in common.

I finally would like to thanks all of you I met at SOTM, I had great moment with you all.

Feye, Jarai, Jo, Angjelina, Jen and Tshedy.