My experience at YouthMappers Workshop, State of the Map (SotM 2022) and Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G 2022) in Florence Italy from August 18-28 2022.

“YouthMappers is the best, always bringing students, professionals, and industries together”

Actually, this is going to be my first international conference out of Africa it was an amazing conference, and I had the opportunity to meet with different people all over the world. Attending a workshop and two different conferences, I will say it is the best so far.

During the workshop sessions and conference, different organizations hosted additional events, such as HOT unSummit at SotM, HOT unSummit Social in the evening, and YouthMappers Documentary Premiere which was insightful and emotional.

YouthMappers workshop was innovative, it was my first time meeting some people in person, and it was extraordinarily great! During the workshop, YouthMappers history was shared, OSM Teams demo and training, Birds of a feather session, Data Visualization, Online meeting with Carrie Stokes, paired with conference mentor mine is Rory Nealon, I am so happy he accepted, had more discussions, shared ideas and also attended the same program and took some cool pictures, careers, student Reflections, and Expectations Setting.

My first time attending SOTM and FOSS4g in person was unique and full of memories, It was nice meeting people that I have known from both communities from previous remote meetings/ virtual interactions engaged in over the years. On the first day of SOTM, I volunteered for YouthMappers to do a social media takeover, it was incredible and fun. Attended some cool presentations over the days, which are:

• JOSM: Beyond Basic Editing: I work on JOSM every day since 2020, always learning more tips and tricks. It is an easy-to-use OSM software that makes mapping in OSM easier and more interesting using plugins and various mapping tools. While working on JOSM, don’t forget a mouse.
• Satellite Imagery for Social Good: Using AI to generate a building footprint from satellite imagery, mappers working with AI assistance, using Rapid-ID could map between 1000-1500 buildings per working day. Successfully, about 18 million building footprints were automatically extracted and supported by Microsoft.
• Educational initiatives and platforms on OpenStreetMap: making open data more accessible: Especially for students who need open data to be more accessible to do research work that is why I attended. It aims to enlighten existing educational activities and platforms around OpenStreetMap topics, including editing, data usage, and community governance, to explore how new users and data consumers can approach OpenStreetMap more easily, and eventually widespread its adoption.

Lest I forget, I spent some quality time at the YouthMappers booth stand meeting with different Individuals interested in knowing more about YouthMappers.

At FOSS4G conference is for all kinds of people interested in sharing experiences about maps, from developers who write code to users of geomatics software, people who make decisions, researchers, students and anyone who wants to learn, share and meet GIS-interested people.

Patricia Solís, co-founder and director of YouthMappers was one of the amazing and educative keynote speakers at the conference and talked about YouthMappers: a global youth movement on open mapping for humanitarian and development action. She says “Life is a team sport. Be a good ancestor.” I also attended some cool presentations over the days, I attended more of the academic track which will help me in my academic activities in making research on projects and environmental analysis.

• OGC API State of Play - A practical testbed for the National Spatial Data Infrastructure in Switzerland: Making location FAIR ‘Findable’, ‘Accessible’, ‘Interpoable’, ‘Reusable’. OGC standards shape a backbone within the OSGeo community in defining a pathway to software implementation toward the standardization of geospatial information and related services ensuring interoperability between FOSS4G software. *Earth Observation DataCubes Multi-visualization Toolbox: It helps us to keep our applied research efforts focused, we have set up an independent international expert advisory group. Indeed, we wanted above all to provide something useful and concrete for the actors in the field.
• Assessing land surface temperature in urban areas using open-source geospatial tools: Land surface temperature (LST) in urban areas is an important environmental variable considered a reliable indicator of the urban using a global scale such as MODIS, Sentinel 3, ASTER, Landsat 7 ETM+, or Landsat 8 TIRS.
• Client-side Web Mapping system for vineyard suitability assessment: WebGL is a cross-platform, open web standard JavaScript API for 2D and 3D graphics in modern Web browsers that allows the GPU-accelerated usage of image processing without the use of plug-ins, implementation of data analysis using WebGL and especially the map algebra function. Using Leaflet to develop the Web Mapping interface, which has a graphical interface to input map algebra formulae and a function to display and export the image of vineyard suitability.
• OpenStreetMap Element Vectorisation - A tool for high-resolution data insights and its usability in the land-use and land-cover domain: Using POST requests and Java to prove its potential, the tool is applied to a set of 1k randomly selected OSM LULC elements
• Geospatial data exchange using binary data serialization approaches: large volumes of data have been implemented and analysis of a set of experiments to analyze the use of binary data serialization as an alternative to data exchange in XML or JSON data formats for several commonly encountered GIS workflows.

Having the opportunity to join the HOT unSummit mapathon, it was amazing to share ideas about the mapathon and have cool interactions with others.

While at the conference I realized that I have mapped over 45 countries in the world, and I realized that I haven’t mapped Italy, in general, I had no idea what the area looks like in an Aerial view until I visited the place and I was surprised.

All of these above is what I shared with the YouthMappers Unilorin when we had a panel session.

All thanks to YouthMappers for inviting me to join the workshop and conferences and providing me with a conference stipend. Also, I would like to thank the local organizers of SoTM for giving me a limited travel grant.

I was part of the volunteers in the SOTM preparation for the virtual conferences, I have always preferred to reserve a particular space equipped enough to participate during the conference. I must say due to traveling and preparing for Africa GIS conference calls, I didn’t prepare such an environment to attend this conference but I used any of the opportunity I have to attend. In spite of all, I had quality time to join in at some scheduled talk sessions and networking sessions with participants from other parts of the world at large.

One of the amazing talk sessions I learned most was a talk on “Community mapping to improve flood preparation in Nigeria” which was facilitated by Sharmila because in some areas in Nigeria are facings water challenge and other areas are facing water scarcity. The talk exposed the different most flooded areas affecting communities and it also presented a solution by using mapped buildings, roads, and water areas edits on OpenStreetMap. The two areas stated earlier must solve both challenge simultaneously. The facilitator also recommended other solutions that could solve the flooding problems.

During the event, I networked with GUY a member of OpenStreetMap in. Cote d’Ivoire and the interesting part was that we meet at Africa GIS conference in person such an amazing network session to talk more and take pictures together. We discussed the SOTM conference, talk about his country shared our experience in contributing to OSM, and also exchanged contacts. At the Network break session, I also had a call with Becky Chandiru, who was one of the facilitators during the HOTOSM Data quality internship 2020. We made use of the period to connect well enough and shared some ideas with each other.

I really had a great time and an insightful learning period at the SOTM Conference 2021, even though I didn’t have much time to spend on it but it was amazing. Kudos to all the organizers, volunteers and the participants nice have you all. See you all physical next year SOTM AFRICA.