Hello everyone, better late than never, and yeah, that’s my first time here =D

This is meant to be a testimonial covering a somewhat more technical part, for a more “fun” version, I made a thread on Twitter* with LOTS of good photos!! (last year I’ve made a similar) !!

Well, in the beginning, I wasn’t expecting to even be at the event, like, another continent, too expensive travel… I’ve submitted my piece of work, that I was already working on It was (accepted)[https://talks.osgeo.org/foss4g-2023/talk/CRPWUS/]!

Then I’ve been approved for the travel grant program and also as a volunteer!!! I was so so glad, then I need to say thanks again for OSGEO, FLOSSK, UFPR, and HOT they were the ones that made the travel possible!!

Kosovo is a lovely country, there’s amazing and quite affordable food everywhere! Also, the locals and the “locals”, but from Albania (I found this shared sense of belonging very enchanting) received me very well, I got to know many badass people from FOSS community, like the giants from OpenLabs and Cloud 68, they are incredible people and contributors, now I’m really eager to get to know Tirana!

Now getting to the promised technical part: I saw so many solutions and applications, It’s so amusing to see ever-growing FOSS software, including in fields like 3D GIS and even digital twins fancy stuff.

As an OSM lover what I found most heartfelt was that everyone was so fond of OSM there, all applications with base maps had some OSM flavor/derived there, and all making analysis using OSM as the main or one of the data sources…

Which is also my case!! I was there presenting (OpenSidewalkMap)[https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Opensidewalkmap] which was first introduced in (SoTM 22 as a poster)[https://files.osmfoundation.org/s/RRk9zSzjkPxz7kM]. Still, there are some issues to fix (then I will make a proper announcement, with workshops to deploy nodes and all!), but the idea of OpenSidewalkMap (which name is due to an original ideal to be something more similar to “OpenRailwayMap” or “OpenSeaMap”, “OpenCycleMap”) is to be a zero-implementation costs inventory system for pedestrian network management! It is all run inside Github: data is stored in repos; the backend is in a single repo; content is deployed using GitHub pages; data and content are updated daily using GitHub actions!! The working side is made possible using a decentered infrastructure: each node is stored in a different repo. Each node contains a modular structure, with each module being a functional part: a web map; an optimized routing app; a dashboard; a data quality analysis hub. In the future, there will be more modules! You can already access the project, but recall that it’s still in the beta phase!

I also had many enriching technical (and at the same time fun, that’s the best thing about conferences) conversations about subjects like metadata, tiles of any kind, data formats, integrations, and APIs, the whole thing was overwhelmingly interesting!

Another quite nice part was to rejoin many amazing people that I got to know last year at SoTM and FOSS4G Firenze, highlighting people from Humanitarian Openstreetmap Team, highlighting Petya and Syenne! People from HOT are the ones that I have the most gratitude for and love to work along!

There were also many people that were missing, I was expecting all guys from last year =( .

So, for now, is that, thanks for your reading!!!

*(yeah, I know the recent problems that recently appeared there, but still were most people are, and I didn’t found a better solution yet, Mastodon still too lonely)