@tordans Great! I hacked together a script to generate the gifs from .osm files using Map Machine.

how did you get in contact with [first time mappers]?

Black magic. This is mostly off the back of the existing community of meetup and convention goers. Start doing it then start talking about it I think. This is one reason that these write-ups are valuable to me :)

Which apps? modes? etc.?

Yes, mostly like the last post. This is really “find what feels good” for you.

We are encouraged to write about each meetup, so a process overview would be a good topic to fill it with.

There are too many good apps with good features that are too hard to find. I love to see any refined process explained. Maybe a bunch of the tutorial wiki pages need to grouped together and ruthlessly improved and updated from peoples experiences like this, so we can narrow down to a few local maxima: prominant, simply documented, quick to skim through intro to one mode of mapping.