Dear HOT members,

my name is Marco Minghini and I come from Como (Italy). First of all, I wish to express my gratitude to Cristiano Giovando for suggesting my name for HOT membership. I would be delighted to become part of such a great community.

I have carried out my studies in Environmental Engineering (specialization in Geomatics and GIS) at Politecnico di Milano, where I obtained a BSc in 2008, a MSc in 2010 (both with honours) and a PhD in 2014. Since then I am working as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the GEOlab (Geomatics and Earth Observation laboratory) of Politecnico di Milano in Milan (Italy).

I am passionate about open source software, that I use everyday in my research activity, and enthusiastic of open data. Since 2015 I am a Charter Member of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) thanks to the contribution I have given in the education, promotion and development of open source geospatial software and open geodata. Despite knowing the OpenStreetMap project since my MSc studies, it was only thanks to my PhD research (focused on Volunteered Geographic Information and Citizen Science) that I really started to study the project, to understand its evolution and impact, to analyse its applications and to use its data. After almost three years since then, I have become an experienced researcher on OSM, particularly on topics such as OSM data quality, OSM contribution patterns and contributors’ motivations, and exploitation of OSM data to derive concrete products like land use and land cover maps.

Soon after my first OSM edit in 2014 I discovered the impressive work of HOT and I started devoting my time as a volunteer of this network. In addition to being a proud humanitarian mapper, over the last couple of years I have been supporting HOT and Missing Maps through the organization of mapathons at Politecnico di Milano (e.g. after the earthquakes in Nepal in 2015 and Ecuador/Japan in 2016) and the provision of support/training to different communities. When organizing these mapathons I had the plasure to know and to personally interact with Tyler Radford and Cristiano Giovando (who gave an exciting live skype call during our event for OSM GeoWeek 2015) as well as Blake Girardot, who often setup customized mapping projects for us. In particular, the kinds of events I am most proud of are the so-called “minimapathons”, that are mapathons for primary school children. Notably, in March 2016 my colleagues and I organized a successful humanitarian mapathon by involving 200 10-year old students in mapping buildings for a project on malaria in Swaziland (see this post on HOT’s blog).

I am also an active promoter of HOT and its activities among my research and professional network. As an example, as the responsible and point of contact of GEOlab for the GeoForAll network, in 2016 I gave a webinar on how to organize a humanitarian mapathon. I have also promoted humanitarian mapping at national events, for instance the 2016 conference of the Italian OSM community (OSMit 2016). In few days (on Friday, February 10) I will give an invited speech on “OSM for emergencies” at OSMit 2017, where I will present the activities of HOT and focus on the mapping effort of the Italian community after the terrible earthquakes occurred in 2016.

Finally, some students at Politecnico di Milano have recently found PoliMappers, an official student association which became the first European node of the YouthMappers network. I was proud that they asked me to become the Faculty Mentor of this association. The activities planned include both field mapping and remote mapping on HOT’s tasks and I have already given some tutorials on how to use OSM mapping tools (until now iD, JOSM and Field Papers). Finally, last year I made my first donation to HOT as I really believe in the value of its activities.

With no doubt I will continue to support HOT in 2017 and beyond. In particular, as I have just become the Secretary of ISPRS WG IV/4 “Collaborative Crowdsourced Cloud Mapping (C³M)” as well as a member of the new EU COST Action CA15212 “Citizen Science to promote creativity, scientific literacy, and innovation throughout Europe”, I plan to make more and more people in these networks aware about the potential of humanitarian mapping using OSM. Thanks to the collaboration with PoliMappers, I will of course continue to organize humanitarian mapping events and provide the required training and support. Finally, depending on the time required, I would like to start being involved in one of the HOT Working Groups – perhaps the one on Training.

My OSM username is mingo23 and my Twitter profile is @MarcoMinghini. Here you can find an updated list of all my activities (such as events organized and papers written) related to OSM.

Thank you very much for your attention and for considering my nomination. Best regards and happy mapping to everyone!

Marco