A bookmarked tweet from Ulises Ibarra reminded me that 8 years ago a bunch of us map nerds were celebrating Valentine’s Day by having a meet up to talk about OSM and HOT in Mexico City. The irony of doing that instead of proper V-Day celebrations didn’t go unnoticed then and it feels only fitting to commemorate it.

I’ve been thinking all day about community work, care work, and knowledge-sharing as acts of love. I owe so much knowledge, practical skills, and valuable lessons to communities and individuals that selflessly shared their expertise and wisdom. It seems appropriate to write a quick recap/thank you note/valentine’s day card to the people that introduced me to OSM.

• Thanks to Maggi Kelly and her course ESPM233 for introducing me to participatory mapping and OSM in 2009.

• Thanks to Mapbox’s community work. Alex Barth and Eric Gundersen came to Mexico to do some OSM evangelization in 2012. I honestly believe that this generated the inertia needed to start a local OSM community.

• Thanks to Ulises’ persistence and community organization since 2013. Taller de Mapas, GeoInquietos, OSM México. Regardless of what we called it, Ulises’ perseverance and countless volunteer hours translated into community building and organization that kept the project going. I look up to Ulises’s capacity for care work to maintain and nurture communities.

• Thanks to the community at el Rancho Electrónico for creating and maintaining the perfect space for horizontal knowledge-sharing and “collaborative cooperation” as they call it. The “Taller de Mapas” couldn’t have found a better space to grow. Some of the most stimulating and engaging multi-discipline cross-pollination discussions that I can remember happened there.

• I am forever grateful for the OSM community’s contributions to the map. OSM data has been very central to my work in the past decade. Several of my projects owe their success to the selfless time invested in edits, correction, validation, and data enrichment from many people in the OSM community around the world.

I have the utmost respect for people that work in education, in every form it can take. It’s an act of love and faith because it is hard to see the positive impact that you have in the community. I want to reiterate that your altruistic contributions and knowledge-sharing have not gone to waste. All that collective intelligence has radically improved projects on open data, social protection, food security, housing, urban planning, transportation, climate change adaptation, disaster mitigation, etc. With gratitude for the open data and community training that have benefited my projects, I have also tried to share this knowledge with others, both near and far. I hope that these diaries become another way to share how OSM data has nourished my work, hoping it helps germinate new projects alike.

Happy Valentine’s Day and Gracias <3

Edgar