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The six pilot workshops to the BNPB on intermediate OSM skills were completed earlier this week. Our team of eight HOT trainers finished their last workshop to members of the Kupang government with an interesting ending. The day we ended our workshop we flew home to a flooded Jakarta. The BNPB had sent us the maps, which used the OSM data we gathered last year as a base map, that showed the affected areas. (Though we knew what to expect when heading home, it still was a shock to see so many roads flooded and people surrendering their beds and belongings to higher ground. Read more about the Jakarta Floods here.)

In Dakar, back from Saint-Louis where I have been mostly working animating the OSM SN community in this town harnessing on our partnerships with BantaLabs and University Gaston Berger and reaching out to new partners from NGOs and Governements. Prior getting into details about those intense and rich days for the OSM Project Senegal and its community, I'd like to take a look back at the past weeks since the end of the HOT set up mission of this program by Mid December.

At BarCamp Thies

Augustin and I conducted HOT’s third deployment HOT to Senegal 24 November to 15 December, 2012. The main objective: set-up Augustin Doury for five months of volunteering to grow the OSM SN community and to improve the maps of the area. This initiative has been possible with the funding of Fondation de France (FDF) and our partnership with OpenStreetMap France.

We first meet the ACCESS partners from Selayar Island at a workshop in Bali in December 2011. After this workshop ACCESS organized their own...

In December an exciting partnership agreement was signed in Indonesia which will continue the creation of freely available OpenStreetMap data in the West Nusa...

As one of the co-founders of HOT, Mikel has years of experience working on mapping projects all around the world. After studying computer science at the University of California: Santa Cruz, he got his start with Yahoo and wrote some of the first code for OSM in 2005. His programming and geography skills have enabled him to contribute to the general OpenStreetMap project and various aspects of the Humanitarian OpenstreetMap Team.

What good are maps if they are not beautiful? Last week, Jeff Haack and I taught the eight Indonesian trainers how to use Mapbox...

Last week, we started intermediate training for the six disaster prone provinces that we are piloting. Our intermediate material covers some gaps that we did not have time to cover in the beginning workshops, like how to offset imagery that is incorrectly georeferenced and/or conflict resolution.We covered general topics that focused on better OSM editing and validating: 01. Editing in Detail 1.5. Conflict Resolution02. Quality Assurance (and the Tasking Manager)03. Editing the Wiki 04. Creating XML and JOSM presets05. Private Data Store

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]

Since August 2012, the HOT team has included eight Indonesian trainers who teach beginning and, soon, intermediate and advanced OSM workshops all over Indonesia. Six of these OSM instructors were hired in August, while two (Emir and Va) have been working with Kate since June 2011. This week, we will meet Dewi Sulistioningrum (say that ten times fast...).