Sharing with you again some of the things that Ruben and I have been excited about, and some of what’s coming up, in the HOT community and across the humanitarian open mapping movement.

Things that have excited us this week…

Congrats to the HOT training working group who had an impressive 52 participants at the advanced JOSM training last weekend!

Chisom Okwuchi shared a lovely OSM diary of her experiences as a Community Working Group mentorship lead…

… and, the organising group for the mentorship program is now planning for the next phase and will be looking for mentors and mentees in the next few months!

Shout out to Kraan46, one of HOT’s global validators, who has now validated on 360 days out of the last year — an impressive feat and huge contribution!

Contribution timeline for Kraan46!

Kudos to OSM Uganda, who have established a new MOU with the Terego district on integrating OSM learning into schools.

Cool to hear that the Suza YouthMappers have just started working with the Jane Goodall Institute for forest monitoring through community mapping.

The State of the Map Africa logo was launched to the public and is really nice! The event is in December this year in Cameroon.

Ruben Martin also shared that he’s been digging deeper into the research on declining contributions in 2022 and is seeing some upward trends too (in the numbers too at a more granular level). Full report to come once the research is done…

The Open Mapping Hub — Asia Pacific has published an approach for improving OpenStreetMap data quality in the region.

Lastly, at the OSM Africa mapathon, hosted by OSM Angola recently, the mayor of the town being mapped turned up and addressed the mappers directly! Very cool…..

What’s coming up?

The Llamitas Mapeadoras YouthMappers chapter released the schedule for the Tambomachay project, which looks like a very exciting, collaborative mapping project in Peru. Also, they have the best logo 😎👌🔥

The 28 of 28 campaign from OSM Ghana is taking place in February again with a prize for the winner. Get involved!

Following a successful pilot, the HOT Summit Working Group proposed to the senior management team to evolve the unSummit concept over the next two years as core programming and it was unanimously supported. The working group is now moving into planning to make it bigger, better, and more impactful.

We’ll be continuing work on replacing the HOT website in order to provide a better experience and resources, help people find the right path to solve problems through open mapping and discover others who have been solving similar issues.

As always, we hope this update helps you keep up with some of what’s going on. We’re just trying this out to see whether a weekly digest like this is useful to people across the community… If you have any questions or want to suggest something that should be in here but isn’t, feel free to reach out in the comments!

These weeknotes are cross-posted on Medium