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State of the Map US: San Francisco 2013

Sunday Schedule

Saturday
Sunday
Routing
Games
9:30am

1

David Emory, OpenTripPlanner: Recent Developments in Multimodal Routing with OSM

Track 1

OpenTripPlanner: Recent Developments in Multimodal Routing with OSM

David Emory

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OpenTripPlanner (OTP) is a leading open source platform for multimodal trip itinerary planning and transportation system analysis, established in 2009 and now deployed in 14 countries. OpenTripPlanner has long had a close association with the OpenStreetMap project, with the majority of OTP deployments relying on OSM data for street network routing, and the deployment of OTP helping to drive local OSM improvement efforts in many communities where it has been introduced.

This presentation will serve as a follow-up to the introductory OpenTripPlanner talk at the 2012 State of the Map US, focusing on recent and ongoing developments with the project. These include the development of new user interfaces, initial work on support for driving navigation, and the ongoing development of the OTP Analyst extension, a package that uses OTPs routing capabilities to enable advanced transportation policy analysis.

The session will be presented by David Emory, a principal with Conveyal and one of the founding developers of OTP. Conveyal is a new consultancy born out of the OpenPlans transportation technology group and focused on providing support for OpenTripPlanner and related open transportation projects.

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2

Rich Gibson and Sophia Parafina, Jeux Sans Frontires

Track 2

Jeux Sans Frontires

Rich Gibson and Sophia Parafina

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OpenStreetMap is an incredibly rich source of data that can support many uses beyond mapping. One use is to build silly games that may or may not help with geographic literacy. Sophia and Rich built Street Name Fight over the course of a night after much silliness, Mexican food, and scotch. They will discuss obvious things such as technical details and invite other developers to build simple and fun games using the OpenStreetMap platform.

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10:00am

1

Phil Gold, Getting U.S. Highway Shields onto the Map

Track 1

Getting U.S. Highway Shields onto the Map

Phil Gold

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This session will discuss the details and difficulties of creating a framework for a map rendering that uses route relations to place realistic-looking highway shields.

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2

Ryan Closner, Minecraft, Meet OSM: Building a Walkable, 3D, Minecraft-Style OpenStreetMap Editor in Voxel.js

Track 2

Minecraft, Meet OSM: Building a Walkable, 3D, Minecraft-Style OpenStreetMap Editor in Voxel.js

Ryan Closner

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Voxel.js is an open-source, Javascript implementation of the popular game Minecraft. This session will explore the idea of using OSM data to build a simplified 3D version of a city that could more accurately mirror our experience of interaction with urban spaces.

What if instead of editing a map by way of its 2D representation, one could add to the corpus of OSM data by virtually walking through a city and identifying points of interest? What if one could modify ‘ways’ and ‘nodes’ by digging up ‘stone blocks’ and replacing them with ‘dirt’? Would this make OSM more palatable and attractive to a generation of individuals who have grown up interacting with virtual 3D environments? This talk is a retelling of Ryan’s experience implementing OSM data in a 3D representation using Voxel.js.

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Break
Community
OSM in Government
10:45am

1

Richard Fairhurst, You Are Not The Crowd

Track 1

You Are Not The Crowd

Richard Fairhurst

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Is OpenStreetMap a tribe of worker ants? A self-organizing anarchy? Is it truly crowd-sourcing? And how do we recruit a bigger crowd to complete our mission of mapping the world? Is OpenStreetMap’s cause best served by seeking to emulate Google Map Maker and Waze, or are we on the right track already? And if the latter is the case, what’s holding us back?

In this talk, Richard will examine OpenStreetMap’s greatest successes to find the motivations that drive our mappers, developers, and organizers and ask how we can learn from these to build a bigger, better OSM.

This lively session will change how you think about OSM (no refunds available in case of dissatisfaction). Expect Monty Python, church organs, Welsh architecture, European socialism, and the ultimate answer to life, the universe, and OSM mailing lists.

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2

Nate Irwin, Improving Data Collection in OpenStreetMap to Better Map Our National Parks

Track 2

Improving Data Collection in OpenStreetMap to Better Map Our National Parks

Nate Irwin

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The NPMap team recently kicked off work on a system called Places of Interest. This system will provide a way for the OSM community to contribute spatial information (structures, campgrounds, trails, waterfalls, etc.) back to the NPS, and streamline the process of getting National Park Service data into OpenStreetMap. Data that’s collected through Places of Interest will be distributed to NPS personnel at parks, certified, and then exported back out to OpenStreetMap. This data will also be used by a variety of the Park Service’s internal and public-facing desktop, web, and mobile applications (including our basemap, Park Tiles).

If done right, Places of Interest will fundamentally change how the National Park Service does data. There are, however, a slew of hurdles to overcome - some technical, some social, and some institutional. This presentation will cover some of these hurdles and also go into detail about how the NPMap team is planning on implementing their ideas. In addition, it will cover why the National Park Service and other federal agencies cannot simply use raw OpenStreetMap data in its products.

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11:15am

1

Alan McConchie, From Wiki Gardening to Map Gardening: Analyzing Contribution Patterns in OpenStreetMap

Track 1

From Wiki Gardening to Map Gardening: Analyzing Contribution Patterns in OpenStreetMap

Alan McConchie

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This session will propose a framework for classifying and quantifying the ways in which OpenStreetMap contributors interact with OSM data. Existing research does not differentiate between various types of contribution to OSM, even though these activities (such as adding new features in an unmapped area versus modifying the geometry or tags of existing features) may stem from different motivations, rely on different types of skill, and occur in significantly different contexts. This lack of distinction leaves many questions unanswered. Are the users who initially contribute data the same users who later maintain it? Do the types of tasks undertaken by users change over the duration of their engagement with OSM?

Alan will present an analysis of the extent and frequency of map gardening - the crowd-sourced maintenance of geographic data - within OSM, making comparisons across spatial and temporal scales and between individual users. He’ll argue that this typology offers a new tool for understanding what characteristics lead to committed OSM contributors and healthy local mapping communities.

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2

Steven Johnson, OSM and Government What You Need to Know About TIGER

Track 2

OSM and Government What You Need to Know About TIGER

Steven Johnson

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The US-based OpenStreetMap community is one of the largest constituencies for the Census Bureau’s TIGER data. The 2007 data served as the base for OSM in the U.S., and OpenStreetMap continues to evaluate TIGER as a resource. Yet the role TIGER plays within the Census Bureau is not well understood by the OSM community.

This presentation will introduce TIGER in the context of Census Bureau operations, the rationale behind TIGER database design, and how the Census Bureau maintains TIGER.

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11:45am

1

Martijn van Exel, Huddling Around Data: Driving Local Communities on 3.7 Million Square Miles

Track 1

Huddling Around Data: Driving Local Communities on 3.7 Million Square Miles

Martijn van Exel

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Community building can be hard! Especially here in the U.S., with its sprawling urban areas and vast near-empty areas. How do you start a local OpenStreetMap conversation when geography works against you?

This session will propose an alternative strategy for driving local communities - Local Data Dashboards. What if your city, region, or state had its very own page showing always up-to-date statistics about OpenStreetMap in your areaof new mappers, rankings, maps showing where folks have been busy, and where data is growing stale? What if that Dashboard had social tools letting you easily email local mappers and start a local forum or mailing list? Martijn will show a very early prototype and will ask for your ideas for the Dashboard.

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2

Jim McAndrew, USGS National Map Corps

Track 2

USGS National Map Corps

Jim McAndrew

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The United States Geological Survey (USGS) National Map Corps uses the OpenStreetMap editing platform to collect and manage points on their map. The project has recently expanded to 19 states, with plans to expand to the entire country by the end of the year. This will will discuss the project and the possibilities for importing the USGS crowdsourced data back in to OpenStreetMap.

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12:15pm

1

Kathleen Danielson, Mappers in (Meat) Space

Track 1

Mappers in (Meat) Space

Kathleen Danielson

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Do you have a local group of mappers who you see regularly, or do you only see mappers once a year at SOTM? This session will talk about why you might want to join or start a local meetup group, how to get it started, and how to keep momentum up. Kathleen, one of the organizers of the very active Washington, DC geo group as well as other local communities, will discuss:

  • Why meet in person?
  • How to find mappers near you
  • How to assess your community’s needs
  • Strategies to spread the word
  • Ideas around keeping momentum up

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2

Mamata Akella, Why the U.S. National Park Service Contributes Back to OSM

Track 2

Why the U.S. National Park Service Contributes Back to OSM

Mamata Akella

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The NPMap team is responsible for coordinating web mapping across the U.S. National Park Service. One of its primary responsibilities is creating customized basemaps and web applications for individual parks. To build these applications the team uses a variety of technology and data including OSM.

In this talk, Mamata will discuss the results of a pilot project with America’s most visited National Park - the Great Smoky Mountains - and efforts to improve park data in OSM and in turn the National Park Service’s own mapping products. With the National Park Services’ adoption of open source tools, data, and basemap services, it has a vested interest in contributing to and improving data in OSM.

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Lunch
Communicating About & In OSM
Working with Big Data
1:45pm

1

Frederik Ramm, Open For Business

Track 1

Open For Business

Frederik Ramm

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This session will discuss what it means to start a business around using OpenStreetMap and the benefits inherit in going open with your business model. Frederik, a founder of the small OSM consulting firm Geofabrik, will talk about interesting projects, strange clients, stuff that worked well, and decisions he won’t make again - in short, lessons learned from a couple years of earning one’s bread with OpenStreetMap.

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2

Schuyler Erle, A Gazetteer for the Library of Congress

Track 2

A Gazetteer for the Library of Congress

Schuyler Erle

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The Library of Congress and the New York Public Library have been developing an open source gazetteer platform to power geographic search across their bibliographic collections. This gazetteer and concordance pulls together various sources of contemporary and historical geographic information - including OSM - and makes them available for easy management by Library staff and public volunteers alike. This session will discuss the challenges of conflating OpenStreetMap data with other data sources, as well as provide geographic text search at scale.

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2:15pm

1

Alyssa Wright, The Threads of OSM Discussions: Are the Doors Really Open?

Track 1

The Threads of OSM Discussions: Are the Doors Really Open?

Alyssa Wright

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OpenStreetMap exists with what Gabriella Coleman calls a collaborative ethical temperament - one that explicitly honors transparency, accessibility, and openness for the purpose of participation. Vibrant and open dialog is key in encouraging and facilitating this participation. But are the doors really open to anyone?

In this talk Alyssa will introduce openthreads, a platform for the analysis and visualization of listserves. Through the openthreads methodology, alongside various visualizations of OSM mailing lists, she’ll demonstrate how OSM dialogs start and exist over time. Who has a voice? What does it mean to participate in OSM discussions? And what can we do to hold ourselves accountable in creating an even more diverse community of participation?

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2

Dennis Watson, Build a craigslist Scale Map Installation with OSM Data

Track 2

Build a craigslist Scale Map Installation with OSM Data

Dennis Watson

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Craigslist serves 50 billion monthly page views to 60 million users across 700 sites in 70 countries. Self hosting a complete map service from top to bottom at this scale presents many challenges including:

  • live updating of OSM data
  • map styling for sense of purpose
  • rendering and serving map tiles
  • geocoding user input
  • searching geodetic data
  • displaying geodetic results in meaningful ways
  • giving back to OSM with user data feedback

In this talk Dennis will address all these issues and discuss how his team implemented the above at craigslist scale.

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2:45pm

1

Martijn van Exel, MapRoulette, One Year Later

Track 1

MapRoulette, One Year Later

Martijn van Exel

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MapRoulette, which started out as the Remap-a-Tron, was presented last year at State Of The Map Portland. Since then, it has evolved into a popular mapping pastime for both casual contributors and hardcore mappers. This session will look at the accomplishments and milestones of MapRoulette in the past year, and provide an outlook for the year(s) to come.

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2

Nathaniel V. Kelso, Introducing Quattroshapes, the Global Polygon Gazetteer

Track 2

Introducing Quattroshapes, the Global Polygon Gazetteer

Nathaniel V. Kelso

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Foursquare needs quality place data to power its geocoding engine to ensure the best recommendations. When someone searches for best coffee in Brooklyn, a simple venue to place point or venue to place bounding box search can result in venues in Manhattan and Jersey City overwhelming the results for Brooklyn. To improve recommendations, they’ve created an authoritative source of polygons around a curated list of places. This gazetteer of non-overlapping polygons provides more relevant results than simple point geometries.

This work is based on foursquare checkins, geocoded photos from Flickr, and an extended version of Natural Earth. The quattroshapes technique calculates the dominant place ID for a given area based on heterogeneous inputs and supplemented geometries with open government data. The quattroshapes code and resulting polygons are licensed under CC-BY.

Geocoding can be the hardest part about going open source - and geo and reverse geocoding is even harder. Reverse geocoding reports the gazetteer place for a latitude and longitude map location or address string and is useful when source data needs to be normalized. This new polygon gazetteer data is used in TwoFishes, the coarse splitting geocoder (and reverse geocoder) written in scala from David Blackman at foursquare.

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Break
New Data
OSM Around the World
3:30pm

1

Ollie Guinan, Data on Demand: Rapidly Available Satellite Imagery and OSM

Track 1

Data on Demand: Rapidly Available Satellite Imagery and OSM

Ollie Guinan

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OpenStreetMap is rich with detailed data about the world. Turning that data into useful information is the next big challenge. Skybox Imaging is launching a fleet of high-resolution imaging microsatellites to capture timely imagery of the world. Skybox uses OpenStreetMap data to provide context to our change detection algorithms and analysts as they turn this raw data into useful information.

From simple land parcels to road vectors to trees in parking lots, OSM data has proved invaluable as a reliable and up to date source of reference data. For applications like disaster recovery and economic analysis, knowing what should be at a location is as important as knowing what is at a location. Making OSM data available in an easy to use form allows human analysts to identify new information in satellite images and focus their attention on the changes of highest interest.

This session will provide an overview of how Skybox makes image data available for analysis and how OSM provides the background for this analysis.

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2

Dale Kunce, Humanitarian OpenStreetMap at the Red Cross: The Inside Story

Track 2

Humanitarian OpenStreetMap at the Red Cross: The Inside Story

Dale Kunce

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Over the last three years, the American Red Cross’ International Services Department went from a geospatially unaware institution to an active user, contributor, and advocate of OpenStreetMap and geospatial technologies for its humanitarian responses and long-term programs. Everywhere it works, OSM is becoming the first-choice map and data layer employed to orient Red Cross teams.

And the Red Cross is not just users, but also contributors. In Uganda, Colombia, Indonesia, Argentina, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the American Red Cross remotely maps disaster prone communities and ongoing disaster sites to assist on the ground response teams. In Chile, Uganda, Indonesia and Nepal, they train and equip OSM field teams within Red Cross National Societies capable of mapping communities we preparing for disasters. Back in the U.S., they’ve engaged Tulane and George Washington University students to remotely map priority project sites around the world.

This team owes its successes entirely to the good will and assistance of the OSM community. This presentation will fling the doors wide open and show the Red Cross’ OSM accomplishments and their roadmap for the future. Recommended for anyone interested in seeing how OSM can benefit international humanitarian organizations.

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4:00pm

1

Jeffrey Johnson, Using GeoGit with OpenStreetMap: Distributed Versioned Spatial Data Editing

Track 1

Using GeoGit with OpenStreetMap: Distributed Versioned Spatial Data Editing

Jeffrey Johnson

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GeoGit is a new open source software project that is designed to allow for multiple individuals to contribute to geospatial feature data while providing versioning, provenance, and support for collaborative workflows. This session will explore interoperability between GeoGit repositories and OSM.

GeoGit is designed to allow for multiple individuals to contribute to geospatial feature data while providing distributed and decentralized versioning. With this capability we can move into a paradigm that allows for distributed collaboration on geographic data development and management while synchronizing with larger centralized repositories such as OpenStreetMap. GeoGit provides the ability to maintain a history of the changes to geospatial vector data, track who provided the changes, store comments on the reasons for the changes similar to the OSM API, and overall makes it easy for a user or organization to establish and maintain their own node. GeoGit provides the ability to track and maintain the provenance of the data in a distributed and sometimes connected environment. By combining GeoGit with user-focused applications and portals, this can be done in such a way that the provenance of the data is maintained throughout the process and interoperability with repositories such as OSM is simple and painless.

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2

Schuyler Erle, Helping People in Need with OSM

Track 2

Helping People in Need with OSM

Schuyler Erle

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The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team is a non-profit organization composed of OpenStreetMap contributors and humanitarian aid workers who collaborate to map areas affected by humanitarian crisis. This session will talk about what HOT does, how the organization works works, what it’s doing now, and its plans for the future.

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4:30pm

1

Nelson Minar, TopoJSON: A Smaller GeoJSON with Some Neat Tricks

Track 1

TopoJSON: A Smaller GeoJSON with Some Neat Tricks

Nelson Minar

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TopoJSON is a serialization format for geographic data that offers efficiency through topological representation. An extension of GeoJSON, TopoJSON describes lines and polygons in terms of shared arcs. By encoding each arc only once files with overlapping geometry (such as county boundaries) are significantly smaller. Arcs are described by an efficient fixed-precision delta encoding that results in significantly smaller serialized data. Compared to their GeoJSON equivalents, OSM road databases in TopoJSON are roughly 80% the size, buildings shrink to 40%, and other geodata like coastlines and county outlines can be 30% or smaller than the original. The relative savings are maintained even after gzip compression.

In addition to smaller size, the TopoJSON encoding also enables applications to easily work on the topology of the data. For example, a chloropleth county map can draw interior borders separately from the exterior borders without extra data or calculation. The TopoJSON software package comes with useful simplification, quantization, and conversation tools. Strong browser support and a smaller wire format make TopoJSON particularly good for use in web browser maps today.

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2

Liz Barry, Ways to Bring Your Aerial Imagery into OpenStreetMap

Track 2

Ways to Bring Your Aerial Imagery into OpenStreetMap

Liz Barry

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Folks from Public Lab will share some of their open source tools that plays well with OpenStreetMap. They’ll run through some of their latest work using or integrated with OpenStreetMap:

  • Did you know that MapKnitter.org, software for turning aerial images into maps, integrates with Potlatch for easy tracing into OSM? This session will show how this can be done and what can be made using MapKnitter.org.
  • A project is starting up for expanding MapKnitter with a Motion Parallax engine to automatically reconstruct a 3D model of the area of interest and output a flat (““orthorectified””) image.
  • Through a new partnership with FlightStats, you can easily place a picture you took from a plane window into MapKnitter for tracing into OSM.
  • Their Android aerial acquisition mobile phone app is fun to use with balloons, kites, RC planes, n-copters, and more.

Come to this session to hear about these ways to integrate your own aerial imagery with OpenStreetMap, and how to get involved with Public Lab.

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5:00pm

1

Reed Duecy-Gibbs, From Plans to Reality: Mapping the Transition

Track 1

From Plans to Reality: Mapping the Transition

Reed Duecy-Gibbs

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Where OpenStreetMap maps the world as it exists, OpenUrban maps the world as it could be. This session will look at how OpenUrban, a non-profit, user generated web map and wiki focused on urban development, maps shared ambitions and ideas people have to make their communities the best possible places to live and work.

The built environment is changing at a tremendous scale and pace and it’s important that people understand these changes. People can’t respond to or develop informed opinions about things they don’t know exist. OpenUrban proposes pushing data on projects tagged as built directly from OpenUrban to OSM. This means that OSM’s data on buildings and infrastructure would be up to date within days or hours in cities where planners, architects, and activists are keeping close watch via OpenUrban.

This session will explore how location based data transitions from conceptual plan to concrete reality in different contexts (e.g. Istanbul v. Seattle v. New York). A major goal will be to open up a discussion on the necessary technical and logistical processes for making these data transformations.

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2

Felix Delattre, Community Mapping in Nicaragua

Track 2

Community Mapping in Nicaragua

Felix Delattre

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A new community is emerging in Nicaragua. This session will discuss how the OpenStreetMap community gained momentum in the country, which lessons have been learned on community building with OSM, what real life problems exist, what makes mapping in Central America unique, and where the local community wants to go next. This is a story-telling session about experiences, mapping parties, influence on local politics, and communities.

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