News — 22 November, 2012

Faces of HOT: Volunteer Joseph Reeves

We have been fortunate to get a few volunteers for this Indonesian project. One of them is the brazen Joseph Reeves (see the pictures below to get an idea of his fame). Joseph works as the IT coordinator at the Oxford Archaeology, but twice he has devoted his vacation time to the Indonesian project. He has helped lead workshops on the basics of OpenstreetMap. [inline:jose.jpg]

We have been fortunate to get a few volunteers for this Indonesian project. One of them is the brazen Joseph Reeves (see the pictures below to get an idea of his fame). Joseph works as the IT coordinator at the Oxford Archaeology, but twice he has devoted his vacation time to the Indonesian project. He has helped lead workshops on the basics of OpenstreetMap.

I was fortunate to be able to interview him while he was here in October for a two week stint. We discussed the strengths and weaknesses of OpenstreetMap. He had some interesting things to say about overcoming language barriers when teaching JOSM and other OSM tools. Joseph believes that Open Source and ideas like OpenstreetMap are necessary tools; however, in order to create something global you have to take into account the local languages. Indonesia has over 23 million native speakers (there are hundreds of other dialects spoken as well) and is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world. However, without the work from our eight Indonesians, the wiki pages and applications in OSM are extremely lacking.

If you get the chance, HOT is always looking for knowledgeable OpenStreetMap users to come help out on some projects. Put your skills to good use! Contact apply@hotosm.org if you are interested in coming to teach OSM for our project.

Until next time...