One year ago, the memorable experience of my first State of the Map conference in beautiful Japan ended with me being up on stage and announcing that the next edition of SotM would have been in Milan, hosted and co-organized by my university, Politecnico di Milano!

Coming to State of the Map 2018 in Milan has been a long and thrilling journey. First, I’m proud to say that I kept all the promises made one year ago: to become an even more active OSM contributor, to become a member of the OSM Foundation, and to contribute to SotM 2018 organization! I had the unique pleasure to work behind the scenes with the magic people making each SotM so successful: Rob, Gregory, Christine, Michael, Benoit and Mikel, with the local support of two special people: Alessandro and Francesco. Once again, thank you for your effort – it was great to work with you!

Regarding the conference itself, a result I’m proud to have achieved was the successful organization and running of the first ever Academic Track at a SotM conference, something I personally suggested to the OSMF State of the Map Organizing Committee after the success of my academic talk at SotM 2017 (thanks again for accepting!). Sunday, July 29 has been a full day of interesting talks and discussions around OSM scientific and research topics, and this will be hopefully repeated at the next SotM conferences. The Academic Track included two presentations I co-authored: the first about an intrinsic approach to measure OSM quality, and the second about the analysis of OSM mapping after the 2016 earthquake in Central Italy. As the Chair of the Academic Track, I wish to thank all the members of the Scientific Committee and in particular Peter Mooney, whose help and dedication were essential for the final success.

And, oh yes, on the last conference day I also gave a lighting talk with Prof. Cidalia Fonte on a research work we are currently carrying on together, titled “Automatic classification of building function from OSM” and focused on a case study in Milan.

Unexpectedly, SotM 2018 gave me also the opportunity to meet a special person, a person I’ve mentioned so many times during my OSM talks in the last years: he is Steve Coast, the genius who initiated OSM, the reason why we were all together in Milan! Steve, I know it’s somehow frustrating for you to be seen as “the star”, but believe me, I couldn’t be more happy to finally meet you and to do it in my country, at my university!

But actually, being a member of the Local Team and the responsible for the volunteers, the thing you have probably seen me do more often during the conference was running around the venue :) It has been really a huge effort, we did our best to allow everyone having the best possible experience at the conference. Many thanks to the great team of volunteers, to the tireless PoliMappers guys and to the great staff from Wikimedia Italia – Alessandro, Marta and the magic Francesca, people it’s lovely to work with! The long, long applause we got from the audience during the closing ceremony will be something impossible to forget.

This conference was also my last experience at Politecnico di Milano, the university where I first studied and then worked for a total of 13 years! In fact, starting from August a new work adventure will begin for me at the Joint Research Center of the European Commission. But of course, my love for OSM and my involvement into OSM stuff will not stop! And here the challenge for the next year: becoming involved in the OSMF SotM Organizing Committee!