News — 31 July, 2011
End of an Era or at Least Internship
Friday marked the end of Va and Emir's internship with HOT this summer. We were fortunate to have rockstar interns for this project. You can see it in the public information put out regarding our work here. Everything from training materials to blog posts, to the Facebook page, Twitter, as well as translation of JOSM. We are going to miss working with Va and Emir, but I'm glad to see they are still excited about OpenStreetMap. I'm also happy that I'll get to see them again at the State of the Map Conference in Denver, Colorado in the USA. If you are attending you'll be fortunate enough to meet them as well.
Friday also signaled a new phase in our project in Indonesia. At this point we've run 10 workshops with various groups all over Indonesia. They have taken place in Kupang, Mataram, Waingapu, Padang, BauBau, Takalar, Bantaeng and Bima, Bandung, Surabaya, Yogyakarta and Depok. In some ways I'm just excited I can list all the places off the top of my head, because it has been a whirlwind of mapping. Though in others I'm excited at how many individuals we were able to teach about OpenStreetMap.
While Va and Emir are off to study in Australia as part of a school program next week, Jeff and I are back to the island of Sumbawa. Sumbawa was previously written about on this blog in reference to our workshop in Bima. We are returning to work with individuals we trained from Dompu and Bima to actually do some mapping. The idea is to spend a week mapping a village well to show the potential uses of the data. I will be working in Talabiu which is a village with really good imagery available and Jeff will be in Lanci Jaya which only has corse Landstat available. The impetus of choosing an area with imagery versus one without is to be able to work solely with Walking Papers in one place and do GPS surveying in another. This way we can compare the results and see what we would need to do to use OpenStreetMap on a larger scale for house by house mapping. Also by collecting very detailed data it helps us plan for what types of iconography are missing and if there is anything else we need to think about in terms of mapping and data analysis. The first icon needed we learned about during our workshop in Bima with a long history of traditional horse racing there is a need to be able to mark the tracks.
Race horses being trained on the beach of Bima
After a week of mapping Jeff and I will be returning to Jakarta. That will be our last week in Indonesia until September. During that time we will be doing any necessary planning for our next trip as well as begin outlining the recommendations we have in order to use OpenStreetMap for detailed mapping in Indonesia. Also important we will be calculating the winners of the OpenStreetMap University Competition and announcing them that week as well. The next two weeks promise to be hectic to being to show some results in HOT's work here over the past month and a half. I can hardly wait to share them!