On 18-20 august I participated for the first time on State of the Map conference, which this year was held on Aizu-Wakamatsu Japan. One year ago I started to participate on events organized by Open Labs Albania, the only hackerspace in my country which promotes Free Open Source software and open data. They organize many events for different projects as Wikipedia, Fedora, Nextcloud, LibreOffice etc.

After a few days one of my friends Redon introduced me to OpenStreetMap, he helped me to make my fist changes on a map. And that was it, since that moment I started contributin to OpenStreetMap , firstly editing all the areas that I knew based on ground knowledge. At the beginning I may say that I was so enthusiastic that probably I might have made some mistakes as a newbie mapper that I was. Later I realised that it was important not only to contribute with data, but to try to add data with quality and try to be a good mapper.

I continued to participate on mapathons organized by members of Open Labs and after a few months I was able to co-organize with them. Despite mapping which I started with iD editor I started to search for other tools and so i found the featured desktop editor JOSM, which for me at the beginning was not so easy to use.
My first presentation ever in public was on 14-th of May at OSCAL where I had a workshop for “Editing OpenStreetMap” and also an info booth. I continued to participate on mapathons organized by members of Open Labs and after a few months even I was able to co-organize with them. Despite mapping which I started with iD editor I started to search for other tools and so found the featured desktop editor JOSM, which for me at the beginning was not so easy to use.

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