Filipino YouthMappers: The leaders of TODAY in the local OSM community'
Posted by feyeandal on 27 December 2022 in English.In this blog post, I am highlighting the significant contributions of the local chapters of YouthMappers in the OSM-Philippines community in 2022 and sharing a short reflection about the impacts of YouthMappers in a local context.
I want to start with this statement from Dr. Patricia Solis: “OpenStreetMap (OSM) community is a community of communities.” It captures the fact that OSM is more than just an online community; some diverse mappers contribute to the growth of the community. Some humanitarian mappers contribute data from a humanitarian perspective, helping minimize the impacts of disasters. Some hobbyists have been contributing particular knowledge all over the world for years. And now, corporate actors like Meta/Mapillary, Apple Maps, and Grab are contributing data concerning their corporate interests and for different use cases. Plus, there are local communities all around the world and also the local chapters of YouthMappers. It’s really impressive how OSM is a representation of different communities on the map. 🗺️
YouthMappers is one community that supports and makes up the OSM community. YouthMappers is an international consortium of university-level student mapping clubs with local chapters in universities of various countries. We leverage open data and open mapping such as OpenStreetMap to solve the development needs of the communities.
As young mappers, our goal is not just to build maps but to build mappers. We strongly believe that building the capacity of our mappers could forge collaboration among the communities and encourage the creation of more maps that could benefit the community. 💪
Based on the statistics last August 2022 provided by Jennings Anderson and Dr. Patricia Solis at State of the Map in Florence, Italy, YouthMappers has 324 university chapters on different campuses in 67 countries, and we are proud to say that most of our members are 45% women. 👏