It was wonderful, if slightly overwhelming and sometimes surreal to finally meet so many fellow mappers again at SOTM Firenze last week, as well as so many new friends that I’d only interacted with online. This was my 4th in person event and it reinforced not only how much Crowd2Map has grown since Brussels 2016 but also how the mapping community has changed.

In 2016 arrived in Brussels late at night, a bit disconcerted to find that I was sharing a bed with a stranger - Miriam from GeoChicas. We quickly got over this surprise and she became a great friend and ally, even visiting the FGM Safe Houses we work with in Tanzania en route to FOSS4G 2018. In Brussels I was a newcomer who knew no one. I tried to navigate the seeming chasm between the brown shirted craft mapper gang and the humanitarian team. In Firenze I was very pleased to note much less of this divide. Arriving felt like coming home after a long journey, meeting so many people from previous events and others for the first time IRL.

Particular highlights for me were talking about the impact of our Digital Champion project, meeting colleagues from Missing Maps HOT and Youthmappers who I’d only interacted with online. Kristen Tonga’s talk on the challenges of mobile mapping in rural Tanzania really resonated with our experiences setting up our Digital Champions program, and we look forwards to working with her going forwards.

Ilya is always enthusiastically working on something interesting and this year was no exception, we’re looking forwards to working with him on Every Door soon. The We’re also looking forward

We were particular proud that Binyam Dele Youthmapper Ambassador from Ethiopia wants to replicate our work fighting FGM there.

Greatly looking forward to next meet up - particularly State of the Map Tanzania in January 2023 and hope to see many of the mapping community there either in person or online!

2021 has been a challenging year in many ways, but Crowd2map’s amazing volunteers have kept on mapping, for which I am extremely grateful.

Over 1000 new mappers joined us, and added a further 15,700 km of roads, an additional 435,000 buildings and over 3,300 schools. This means almost 17,000 volunteers have added over 5.4 million buildings to date. We continue to give feedback and train new mappers via our Slack channel, which anyone interested is welcome to join.

As we approach the year end here are some of our highlights.

Although opportunities for face to face meetings were few, we continued our twice weekly training sessions via zoom and managed to speak at HOT summit and various other online conferences including SOTM Africa, where Herry Kasunga talked about our Health Centre mapping project

We were delighted that many of the groups we have trained were awarded microgrants from OMDTZ in June, and we are continuing to work with them in mapping areas such as child labour at informal mines, school gardens to improve nutrition, and gender based violence projects.

The Digital Champions programme we started in 2019 in Serengeti has now been extended to the neighbouring districts of Butiama and Tarime. There is a FGM cutting season in progress now in Mara and these activists have been vital in protecting the community and the maps necessary to find girls at risk quickly. Cutters continue to escape across the porous border into Kenya, highlighting the need for better mapping and cooperation.

In November we celebrated our 6th birthday, with an amazing range of speakers, as you can see here. The recording is here.

In December we celebrated the graduation of our first cohort of interns. Eight women from Tanzania and 3 other African countries joined us for a 12 week training session with HOTOSM interns, as part of the Everywhere She Maps Youthmapper project.

So thank you to everyone who has helped us in 2021 and Happy Mapping for 2022 and beyond!..

I am proud to be a HOTOSM voting member and here is my review of 2018.

2018 was a very busy year for Crowd2Map. We now number over 10,000 volunteers from all over the world with new volunteers joining every day. We have over 2200 members in our active Slack channel - you are welcome to join us here https://join.slack.com/t/crowd2map/shared_invite/enQtNDQ4OTY2MjAyMDY3LTAyYzU5MDQ2MTFiNzk2OGJlNDQwYWY5OWRjNTc1NTFiNjZlOTVjYmJkNmMxYjljMzI1Y2IwYmVhNjlhODliYTE

In September we were invited to organise a mapathon at UNFPA HQ in New York as part of the United Nations general assembly. This was accompanied by concurrent events in 60 countries to #map2endFGM. It was featured on the UNFPA website here https://www.unfpa.org/news/girls-escaping-fgm-rural-tanzania-crowdsourced-maps-show-way-safety

In July we were awarded the Africa award at State of the Map in Milan.We gave a talk there and a keynote on mapping to help end FGM at FOSS4G in Dar es Salaam, who then donated the remaining conference funding to us.This enabled us to buy cheap android phones to train first time smartphone users to map their communities to better protect them.

In December we started a programme to train all 78 village women and children protection committees in Serengeti District to map their villages to better protect their communities, with HOTOSM in a project called WomenConnect funded by USAID.

You can follow how this is going on our blog here https://crowd2map.wordpress.com/blog/ and on twitter @crowd2map and Facebook.

Thank you to everyone who helped us map rural Tanzania in 2018!

I became involved in OpenStreetMap because as a volunteer visiting projects in rural Tanzania I became aware of the lack of maps of this area which greatly hampers navigation and development. With Egle, who I met at Mozfest, I set up a volunteer crowdmapping project to seek to address this called Crowd2Map Tanzania. This recruits volunteer mappers to map rural Tanzania, starting with the area in Serengeti where girls are at risk of FGM (Female Genital Mutilation). There are details of this project here http://bit.ly/FGMSOTM

I became aware of and was greatly helped and guided by many people at HOTOSM and Missing Maps. I regularly attend Missing Maps events in London and have spoken about Crowd2Map at SOTM, Mozfest and talks for Britain Tanzania Society.

OpenStreetMap is an amazing initiative that seeks to put the worlds’ most vulnerable people on the map, and I want to support it in any way I can. I became a HOTOSM voting member in 2017 and I help promote HOT and OSM wherever I can, and ensure it is as inclusive as possible, particularly in less well represented areas such as rural Tanzania. Crowd2Map’s greatest challenge is access to funding so that it can support mapping initiatives in areas in rural Tanzania and so telling stories about the difference mapping makes, such as in Serengeti, shown by this 2 minute video. https://www.facebook.com/ajplusenglish/videos/873491619459013/ is extremely helpful.