It has been only two years since the Latin American OSM community decided it was necessary to have a regional event. The first event took place in Santiago de Chile and the second one in Sao Paulo, Brazil. At the end of the second edition, there were a few places considering organizing the third edition of the event. When I found out Lima was chosen I was very happy. Lima is one of the cities you never get tired to visit and you always discover new things, especially new amazing food 😉
This year Telenav had the chance to be a sponsor. Every State of the Map is a gathering of different efforts that combining together keeps improving the data of the largest geospatial database in the world. This sponsor supported the attendance of Juliana Hernández (Peasent mappers- Tools for learning, teach and strengthen cartography) and Daniel Quisbert (Installing and configuring Offline OSM in Linux). Both conferences were highly appreciated by the attendees. Also, Mapbox and Telenav co-hosted the first anniversary of Geochicas, it was a lovely evening in a historic bar from Lima in the one new geochicas from Perú and Colombia joined the group. We expect more companies to collaborate together to reduce the gender gap in OSM. There are many ideas for what Geochicas will be doing in 2018, please check the full information here.
The keynote was given by Philipp Kandal (A journey with OSM from the past into the Future) In the one Philipp shared his experiences over the years with OSM data and how probe data and using machine learning tools the map its being improved in a tremendous way.
From my side, I had the chance to show the mapping efforts in Canada and the preliminary mapping results from Ecuador, a pilot project we are currently developing to improve road data in one LATAM country. By using Satellite imagery and OpenStreetCam data we started improving the OSM data inroads in September this year. Find the slides here. So far the results we have are the following:
Stay tuned for the updated results in the following months!
This is just the beginning of future collaborations Telenav would like to keep doing with Latam communities by providing tools and guidance in previous projects we have done.
Thanks to the organization team and attendees of SOTM LATAM 2017, see you in other places in 2018!
