OpenStreetMap

It has been three days we returned from Thimphu, Bhutan and I have already started missing the country and the people there. People are very helpful, friendly and motivated. We were invited by Thimphu Thromde through Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team from a project funded by World Bank. Our main aim in Thimphu was to establish a foundation for OpenStreetMap community in Bhutan. We trained people from various background, government officers, non government officers and also students. We saw almost 81 enthusiastic citizens of Bhutan emerged in the world of OpenStreetMap. They were sensitized, trained and became mappers during our 3 weeks of stay in Thimphu. We had 4 days long training from 9 to 5 in the evening and they stayed there motivated and excited to gain the ability of map and show the identity of their local place. We also trained the participants some basic vector analysis and map creation methodology in QGIS (an open source GIS tool). This helped in better understanding for them about the whole GIS system (data creation to data analysis and output). You can see their activities OSM Bhutan facebook group : https://www.facebook.com/groups/osmbhutan/ I hope that they continue to map and foster this OpenStreetMap community to whole of Bhutan.

Discussion

Comment from PlaneMad on 7 September 2016 at 05:51

Amazing to see local governments in the region adopting OSM. Hopefully it does not require the World Bank to fund every such project and these initiatives can be driven by the local residents themselves.

It would be great if you could document the training plan for the benefit of future trainers in other parts of the world.

Comment from MeghaShrestha on 8 September 2016 at 14:28

I hope so too. I hope they continue what they learnt and teach others and built a bigger OSM community there. We will surely document the training plans, our learning and reflections and try to communicate to others as well. :)

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