News — 19 August, 2014

OSM Training in Blantyre for Project Malawi (Week 3)

After a long flight from Jakarta - Kuala Lumpur - Bangkok - Addis Ababa, finally, I finally arrived in Lilongwe, the capital of Malawi and met Severin and Maning. We have a full team now and we will be moving on Sunday to Blantyre for the OpenStreetMap (OSM) workshop.

Before the workshop, we held a series of meetings at the Polytechnic campus and Chanchellor College on Monday (August 11) . We presented on OSM and the project to the students and lecturers.  Spirits were quite high, especially on the Polytechnic campus, where we presented to more than a hundred students!

The purpose of this visit was to gather interest from the students, yet we weren't expecting much interest from them. There were around 80 students filling our form, and we selected 20 students that we thought would be the most interested to have a mapping party on Saturday (August 16).

 

Presentation in Polytechnic Campus (top) and Chancellor College (bottom)

On the next day, the OSM workshop started. The workshop was attended by students and lecturers (both from Polytechnich and Chancellor College), other government departments, NGOs, and civil society. The workshop was held in the Malawi Sun Hotel with 30 participants. It was a 4 day workshop, where we taught them the basics of OSM, field data collection, JOSM editing, and how to get the OSM data. The complete workshop framework can be accessed here.

OSM workshop in Malawi Sun Hotel

 

On the last day of the workshop, we had pre-State of the Map (SoTM) in Malawi, and we invited a local mapper in Malawi. Mostly he mapped roads, including the road blocks.

And here are our nice group photos after the workshop :)

 

Group photos!

 

After we finished the 4 day workshop, we held a mapping party at the Polytechnic Chichiri Campus for the 20 students we selected- 12 of them attended. We gave them a 1-day OSM workshop and asked them to map a lot of features available, for the next 2-weeks. The one who maps the most features will be invited for an internship in mapping in the Nsanje district. 

 

Mapping party in Polytechnic campus.

 

A lot of happenings during the 3rd week of the project and I have learned a lot both from Severin and Maning, plus from the group I've met. I'm very glad that I can be part of this project and I'm excited to see more mappers and OSM contributors in Malawi :)

Photos by Emir Hartato CC BY-SA