My journey with OpenStreetMap (OSM) started unofficially after the 2015 Nepal Earthquake. During this time I experienced the real impact of the use of OSM data by humanitarian agencies in Sindhupalchok—the second most devastated district after the earthquake. After the earthquake for immediate and effective response, the Government of Nepal, National Planning Commission and Himalayan Climate Initiatives’ collective established National Volunteering Program (NVP). I lead the initiative as the national coordinator. As soon as I came back to Kathmandu, I start following mapping work and got introduced to Dr. Nama Raj Budhathoki who was leading the mapping initiative with national and international digital mappers. Later, KLL became one of the co-implementation partners of NVP.

On 27 Oct 2016, I got my account on OSM and started contributing to my best ability on point, line, and polygon. My interest in OSM grew so much that I decided to leave NVP and join KLL to lead the community of OSM Nepal representing KLL. Thanks to the mentorship of Dr. Budhathoki and the team at KLL, I got involved with community expansion by sensitizing around 3000 new people about OSM by visiting various schools, colleges, conferences, and institutions. It was a proud moment for me and KLL that we were able to introduce the first and second cohort of Digital Internship and Leadership Program (DIAL) which was very successful for both quality and quantity contribution to OSM. It was another proud moment to represent the OSM Nepal community to host the 2017 State of the Map Asia conference in Nepal as one of the organizers which were a grand success. The journey with OSM in 2016, 2017, and early 2018 remained more as a contributor on a daily basis whereas the post-2018 is focused on the use of it.

I shortly started my own venture, the Youth Innovation Lab–a not for profit civic tech company in late 2017 and started working on various initiatives using OSM data. The first product that we developed from YI-Lab was mahilapratinidhi.com that uses some layers of OSM. Our second product became revolutionary when we started working with the Government of Nepal, Ministry of Home Affairs on Integrated Disaster Information Management System (DIMS) which is locally named as Building Information Platform Against Disaster (BIPAD). BIPAD was developed to harness the use of Open Data in a Government portal to advance data-based decision making and disaster response. In a six-module platform, the role of Open Data has been instrumental to support each component of incident reporting to risk-related information. This innovation also led to the prestigious Global Resilience Partnership (GRP) mini award and Yi-Lab’s representation to Global Partnership on Disaster Risk Reduction Conference (GPDRR) 2019 in Geneva, Switzerland.

As being closely associated with OSM, it was a proud moment to receive a scholarship as a scholar to attend and speak at the State of the Map (SotM) 2019. This opportunity gave me a chance to meet people with different backgrounds but a common passion for OSM from around the globe. It was great to see how OSM is being helpful all over the world to bridge the

data gap in solving the most critical issues around. It has been great to see initiatives developed based on OSM to solve problems of food and nutrition in Africa, the tools used in mapping hurricane in Asia to the transportation offline app is useful for the Government in transportation navigation—there were dozens more.

The weather of Heidelberg and Kathmandu is pretty similar regardless, it was a little challenging for me to cope up with the environment. But the sessions were so interesting that I possibly could not have missed any of those, be it planned indoor/outdoor or as a social gathering after the session. I was also able to hang out with my friends in the beautiful city of Heidelberg and explore the beauty of ancient civilization that still stands out as the most attractive tourist destination. Attending this conference, I received a lot of ideas and collaboration requests from different Open Data and OSM enthusiasts to work together in each other’s intervention.

Meanwhile, I am reaching out to them to establish a productive partnership and to take the idea of co-working forward. I can proudly say that attending SotM 2019 was one of the best things that I did in 2019. After the conference, I also managed to extend my travel and visit some of the European countries like Spain, France, Belgium, which added more fun to my visit. I am determined that I will keep continuing my efforts to make the OSM community strong and will be guiding more people to join this network and contribute to OSM. I will also make use of my learnings from SotM 2019 in my work and for the sensitization among fellow OSM contributors.