In March 2023, I conducted a survey on women’s participation in OSM activities. It became apparent that individuals’ perspectives came into place and interpreted the survey topic differently. The survey aimed to gather perceptions, opinions, and insights into why some women do not participate in OSM activities and what factors may discourage those who were already participating from continuing. There were various reactions about the survey, from questioning the relevance of the topic to commending the effort to address it.

I was fortunate to have had support from various individuals for the topic, including Heather Leson, Arnalie Vicario, Pete Masters, Geoffrey Kateregga, and the Geochicas family, who were interested and open to exploring the topic through webinars and discussions. One such webinar featured speakers from diverse backgrounds:

• Stellamaris Wavamunno Nakacwa, Programme Director at Youthmappers EverywhereSheMaps
• Mikko Tamura, Community Manager at Open Mapping Hub Asia Pacific
• Jaqueline Amorim, Expert Mapper in Geostatical Data/HOT Data Quality Intern in 2022

The webinar was moderated by Dr. Prince Kwame Odame from Africa, a lecturer at the University of Education Winneba-Ghana. You can review the webinar here.

A unique aspect of the survey was that, in addition to focusing on individuals who identify as women, I also sought perspectives from men. I was pleasantly surprised by some of their positive viewpoints, although there were also negative responses. I am grateful to everyone who took the time to participate in the survey.

One key takeaway from the survey is the importance of considering diverse perspectives. Just because something may not be perceived as an issue by one person does not mean it isn’t significant to others. We all view the world through different lenses, and it’s essential to be considerate and open-minded to learn from various angles.

I appreciate your patience, and below is the summary of the survey and the full report can be read here.

Thank you all for your understanding and support.

The participation of women in activities has fairly increased over years but there are still some gaps that need to be filled and you find that women are missing or are not represented as much as they should. Then the question comes into being that what is preventing these women from participating even though there are opportunities available to them. Is it that they are just not interested or there are unseen / unheard stories that block them from participating?

In view of that I am conducting a survey on Women Participation in OpenStreetMap: Perspectives of all Genders and I will need your help in answering some survey questions.

The summary of the concept is it aims to examine the participation of women in OpenStreetMap from the perspectives of all genders, to identify the gaps that exist, and to determine how best to encourage those who identify as women to participate in OpenStreetMap. Hence a survey to source for the opinions of people. Happy to help answer these survey questions which will take less than 10mins of time :), kindly click the link here

The data gathered will be analyzed and a report will be written to inform the development of programs geared towards the participation of women in OpenStreetMap

However, a few studies have been conducted to analyze the gender distribution of OSM contributors, and the results suggest that women are underrepresented in the OSM community. Read more about the concept here

Thank you :)

I started my OSM journey as a YouthMapper with the University of Cape Coast YouthMapper chapter in 2016. It was very exciting and I loved every moment spent mapping projects on the tasking manager. This increased my zeal in wanting to become a cartographer :) , I can’t tell if it still holds now because I have grown to like the varieties in the mapping field…

Being a YouthMapper was a privilege because I got the chance to work on a project with OpenStreetMap Ghana through our late patron (Mr. James Eshun) which was also very exciting. The project was the Open Cities Africa, Accra Project which was sponsored by HOT. It was in the year 2018 I got to learn about Open Data Kit (ODK) and Open Mapping Kit (OMK). I also got to know about other open source mapping tools such as OSMAnd, OSM tracker and Maps.me. We did some remote mapping using JOSM and ID editor, mapping buildings, roads, POIs etc. and also went to the field to field validation.

After school I then joined OpenStreetMap Ghana as a volunteer and was privileged to be nominated to be part of the board members. As someone who loves to volunteer it was another opportunity for me to learn an also give back to the society.

For the love of contributing to OpenStreetMap, I had the opportunity to join the HOT Data Quality Internship(DQI) in 2020. There I learned more advanced ways of mapping using JOSM and other Open source tool such as QGIS. This sparked my interest in making sure data contributed was of good quality. I again joined DQI in 2021, it was an amazing encounter and another chance to learn about data quality and other open source tools such as OSGeo , Mapillary, Mapbox etc.

Although, I do not mapped as frequent as before, in order to keep myself in check, I joined OpenStreetMap Africa monthly mapathon where I get to map and validate mapathon tasks and also I go to the tasking manager to contribute to urgent projects.

My journey as an OSM mapper have been exciting but also challenging because not all tasks on project are easy to map or validate. In such situation you challenge yourself to critically analyze a particular feature before you map or validate because at the end it is the quality of the data you produce is what matters most.

Happy Mapping :)