State of the Map is one of the biggest OpenStreetMap conference where people who know about OpenStreetMap and want to learn about OpenStreetMap come together. Being part of SOTM-Asia conference in the Philippines with the community and talking to them in person was amazing. It was a great exposure for me to learn how community together built an amazing map of their country/town/village and know the stories behind them.

Sessions/Talks

This was my first State of the Map Asia conference and OpenStreetMap community from more than 10 countries, not just Asian but other parts of the world had also gathered to share their experiences and learnings with fellow community members. The conference exhibited 8 state of the country talks (Japan, India, Taiwan, Sri Lanka, Philippines, Nepal and Bangladesh) which presented great insights on how community is coming together to contribute in different countries and various challenges faced by them. The keynote address by Kate Chapman, Nama Budhathoki, Taichi Furuhashi and Dr. Mahar Lagmay were all very inspiring and encouraging.

Along with these, overall 25 diverse talks were presented highlighting different mapping/geospatial efforts in many countries and few hands-on workshop on various tools like Mapbox Studio, InaSAFE and Mapillary. The talks in the 2 days conference shed lights on different aspects of contributing geospatial data, building a community around keeping this data fresh and use the data in right places for various causes. Interacting with speakers during and post-session helped me in understanding these tools better. There were some great talk where people are building different portals, tools and data which will be helpful in different post-crisis and humanitarian efforts.

Running your own Taginfo instance - Slide Deck

My talk covered on how one can configure Taginfo for a country extract and few of my learnings in maintaining the Taginfo instance for India. Very less Asian counties have good coverage of OpenStreetMap. To gauge and understand the coverage of data in a country, taginfo can be a handy place to check it. As the main site covers and gives the overview of tag coverage for the entire world, the Taginfo application can be used for any specific country to get the similar tagging statistics. Interacted with the OSM Philippines community post talk and planned to set up the Philippines Taginfo instance(temporary URL).

Talking to community is a great way to share the experience, start conversations and get answers to questions. These were the best part of the conference.

Thanks to VISIONS Asia Forum and CrisisMappersJapan for supporting me to be part of this incredible State of the Map.