News — 05 October, 2012

Become a tutor of the Eurosha volunteers!

Nicolas and I have been training the 25 Eurosha volunteers who will be split in 4 four teams for being deployed 6 months in Chad, Central African Republic, Burundi and Kenya over the next 6 months, starting within the next 5-10 days. Marion, Gloria, Alexandra, Anna, Iolanda, Adelina, Désiré, Filip, Lenka, Federica, Jorieke, Morgane, Assania, Serge, Aude, Katerina, Claudia, Orsolya, Pascal, Nanhas, Barbara, Lenka (yes, there are 2 Lenka), Janja, Marine and Hannington are enthusiastic volunteers with social sciences, development, humanitarian or geography backgrounds for most of them, coming from Czech Republic, Italy, Poland, Chad, Bulgaria, Burundi, France, Hungary, Kenya, Belgium, Slovenia and Central African Republic.[inline:P1200042 1024x768.JPG]

Nicolas and I have been training the 25 Eurosha volunteers who will be split in 4 four teams for being deployed 6 months in Chad, Central African Republic, Burundi and Kenya over the next 6 months, starting within the next 5-10 days. Marion, Gloria, Alexandra, Anna, Iolanda, Adelina, Désiré, Filip, Lenka, Federica, Jorieke, Morgane, Assania, Serge, Aude, Katerina, Claudia, Orsolya, Pascal, Nanhas, Barbara, Lenka (yes, there are 2 Lenka), Janja, Marine and Hannington are enthusiastic volunteers with social sciences, development, humanitarian or geography backgrounds for most of them, coming from Czech Republic, Italy, Poland, Chad, Bulgaria, Burundi, France, Hungary, Kenya, Belgium, Slovenia and Central African Republic.

We are training them the best we can during the four days we have, basing our teaching on the LearnOSM chapters and some specific workflow documents. We have the opportunity to get great support from several skilled mappers from the OSM community : Christian Quest from OpenStreetMap France, Madicke Seck and Augustin Doury from the rising Senegal community, as well as Ivan Sanchez Ortega, Fredéric Moine and Stéphane Henriod from the HOT community. Some of them made a long trip to join us in Plaisians, Drôme in the remote and beautiful training centre from Groupe URD. We really want to thank all of them for their coming and their contribution.

Providing a continuous skilled support from a large number of OSM skilled mappers proves to be really an effective way to increase quickly the proficiency of OSM beginners. As you know, these volunteers will be supported by two HOT deployments in each of the four African countries over approximately November and February 2013. But providing a strong, organized and continuous support from the remote OSM community would be a key for making their deployments a success. We already started the discussion in the HOT list about the concept of tutorship over the previous weeks, for which I even created a dedicated wikipage. Time to go ahead now, so we encourage motivated people from the HOT community interested in supporting these volunteers to raise their hands for becoming tutors!