I hope you and your family are safe, healthy, and happy in this challenging time. I have been meaning to write this post since I became the Regional Director for the Asia Pacific Hub early this year. However, I decided to wait until I had something specific and useful to share with you all. Recently, we have made a few important decisions that I am thrilled to share with you through this post.

First, we have decided to name the Regional Hub as ‘Open Mapping Hub- Asia Pacific’.The ‘Open Mapping Hub’ name will also apply to the hubs in three other regions. I believe that this decision is profound and far-reaching. Although HOT is supporting the establishment and operation of the hub, we did not want to narrowly name it something as ‘HOT Asia Pacific Hub’. We want to ensure that the hub creates an accommodating and equitable space for everyone interested in contributing to the OSM movement in the region. We want the hub to be as inclusive as possible.

Those who attended Tyler’s talk at the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Summit in December 2020 should not be surprised by this decision. In his talk, Tyler committed to shifting HOT’s focus from HOT to the wider OSM local communities. The name ‘Open Mapping Hub’ intends to encapsulate this very spirit. We are extremely excited to start our journey with this new name, and I would like to thank everyone who participated in the naming discussion.

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Dear All:

I have been reading messages regarding the election for HOT Board of Directors with interest and contemplating for it. Finally, I decided to declare my candidacy as I feel that my experience of building local OSM community here in Nepal as well as establishing and managing Kathmandu Living Labs as a sort of ‘Local HOT’ might be useful to HOT.

Let me tell you bit more on what I will bring to HOT and where I want to see HOT going.

MY OSM JOURNEY

I first came across OSM in 2006 when I was a graduate student at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Coming from a country where there was not a good map (there still is not), it immediately caught my attention. As I started to observe the phenomenon, I got intrigued and eventually ended up writing the first doctoral dissertation on OSM. During those years, there were two major thoughts within the academic community: one saw it as a mapping revolution whereas other ignored it. In a paper I wrote in 2008, I argued that we should not see this emergent form of mapping as totally separate from traditional mapping; rather we should work to create a synergy between them. I still believe in it.

After spending a year in North America after the graduation, I returned to Nepal at the end of 2011. Since then, I have been working to create a robust mapping community and a detailed map in Nepal. As many of you know, Nepal is seismically one of the most at-risk countries in the world and it needs to remain prepared with good map. However, mapping on the ground here—and perhaps in most developing countries—pose different sorts of challenges: low map literacy to slow Internet connection just to name the few. Despite all these, we are progressing. I had reported this to HOT community in early 2013 (http://hot.openstreetmap.org/updates/2013-02-06_mapping_for_preparedness_in_nepal) and provided updates about a year ago (http://hot.openstreetmap.org/updates/2014-03-10_openstreetmap_on_the_ground_update_from_kathmandu).

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