My experience at State of the Map 2019 started long before the conference itself. As promised in my post after State of the Map 2018 in Milan, I decided to get involved in the OSMF State of the Map Organizing Committee, with the main task to re-propose an Academic Track after the success of the 2018 edition.

This has meant embarking in an exciting but challenging journey started at the end of 2018, where I had again - after Milan’s experience - the pleasure to work with the other members of the Organizing Committee (Christine, Michael, Gregory and Mikel) as well as with the great Local Team from Heidelberg lead by Martin. And, above all, this has meant working with the other members of the Academic Track Scientific Committee: Yair, Peter, Levente and Godwin. We were able to attract a lot of submissions, to edit the publication of the SotM 2019 conference proceedings, to put together a high-quality academic program and to run it successfully in Heidelberg. Thanks again guys, and thanks to all the authors who made the program great with their talks and posters!

The conference has been also a great chance for me to present some of the latest work I’ve been doing with OSM. I gave a lightning talk on “Is OSM up-to-date?”, a software performing intrinsic quality assessment of OSM (slides here, video here); the opening talk of the Academic Track, given on behalf of the whole Scientific Committee about the link between the OSM academic and mapping communites (slides here, video here); and a talk about a statistical-based method to study OSM contribution patterns, developed with my former colleagues at Politecnico di Milano (slides here, video here).

The conference was also a unique opportunity to engage with other members of the Italian OSM community, to meet in person the renowned members of the Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology (in particular Alex Zipf, that I have cited so many times in my research papers), and to meet old and new friends from - literally - any part of the world. These interactions are the real proof of how much this is a community conference!

One of the best memories of my SotM 2019 will certainly be the presentation by Davey Lovin (see video here), from which I happily discovered that the OSM buildings mapped in a world-record humanitarian mapathon with over 200 10-year old children I co-organized in 2016 have been actually used in a real planning project in Swaziland! This is simply amazing and does not only make me proud, but shows how incredible OSM is in connecting communities.

All in all, I feel lucky I’ve been able to attend my third consecutive SotM after 2017 in Japan and 2018 in Italy. I would like to thank my hierarchy at the JRC for allowing me to join this event, the OSM Foundation for its support, the Heidelberg Local Team for the warm welcome and perfect organization (and of course, for the SotM beer!) and everyone for making this event a huge success!

What’s next? 10 months in advance it’s impossible to say if I will have the chance to attend SotM 2020 in Cape Town, but one thing is sure: I will do my best to help again the OSMF State of the Map Organizing Committee in preparing a super event with a super Academic Track!

One year ago, the memorable experience of my first State of the Map conference in beautiful Japan ended with me being up on stage and announcing that the next edition of SotM would have been in Milan, hosted and co-organized by my university, Politecnico di Milano!

Coming to State of the Map 2018 in Milan has been a long and thrilling journey. First, I’m proud to say that I kept all the promises made one year ago: to become an even more active OSM contributor, to become a member of the OSM Foundation, and to contribute to SotM 2018 organization! I had the unique pleasure to work behind the scenes with the magic people making each SotM so successful: Rob, Gregory, Christine, Michael, Benoit and Mikel, with the local support of two special people: Alessandro and Francesco. Once again, thank you for your effort – it was great to work with you!

Regarding the conference itself, a result I’m proud to have achieved was the successful organization and running of the first ever Academic Track at a SotM conference, something I personally suggested to the OSMF State of the Map Organizing Committee after the success of my academic talk at SotM 2017 (thanks again for accepting!). Sunday, July 29 has been a full day of interesting talks and discussions around OSM scientific and research topics, and this will be hopefully repeated at the next SotM conferences. The Academic Track included two presentations I co-authored: the first about an intrinsic approach to measure OSM quality, and the second about the analysis of OSM mapping after the 2016 earthquake in Central Italy. As the Chair of the Academic Track, I wish to thank all the members of the Scientific Committee and in particular Peter Mooney, whose help and dedication were essential for the final success.

And, oh yes, on the last conference day I also gave a lighting talk with Prof. Cidalia Fonte on a research work we are currently carrying on together, titled “Automatic classification of building function from OSM” and focused on a case study in Milan.

Unexpectedly, SotM 2018 gave me also the opportunity to meet a special person, a person I’ve mentioned so many times during my OSM talks in the last years: he is Steve Coast, the genius who initiated OSM, the reason why we were all together in Milan! Steve, I know it’s somehow frustrating for you to be seen as “the star”, but believe me, I couldn’t be more happy to finally meet you and to do it in my country, at my university!

But actually, being a member of the Local Team and the responsible for the volunteers, the thing you have probably seen me do more often during the conference was running around the venue :) It has been really a huge effort, we did our best to allow everyone having the best possible experience at the conference. Many thanks to the great team of volunteers, to the tireless PoliMappers guys and to the great staff from Wikimedia Italia – Alessandro, Marta and the magic Francesca, people it’s lovely to work with! The long, long applause we got from the audience during the closing ceremony will be something impossible to forget.

This conference was also my last experience at Politecnico di Milano, the university where I first studied and then worked for a total of 13 years! In fact, starting from August a new work adventure will begin for me at the Joint Research Center of the European Commission. But of course, my love for OSM and my involvement into OSM stuff will not stop! And here the challenge for the next year: becoming involved in the OSMF SotM Organizing Committee!

As a big OSM passionate I will always remember year 2017, as it gave me the chance to join my first State of the Map conference: SotM 2017 in Aizu-Wakamatsu, Japan, on August 18-20, 2017. I was so lucky to be selected as a scholar, something I did not expect too much when I initially applied.

Even better, my application for a talk at SotM 2017 was also successful and I had the privilege of giving the presentation titled “OSM seen from a GIS researcher: experiences & perspectives”. The purpose of this talk was to give an overview on the ongoing research trends on OSM. More in detail, I presented three applications I have worked on over the last couple of years: 1) a procedure to assess the quality of OSM road networks; 2) an analysis of OSM tagging patterns; and 3) a GIS application to convert OSM data into Land Use/Land Cover (LULC) maps. The slides are available here, while the live recording of the talk can be found here. I was really surprised that my talk has generated so much interest in the audience. I am used to take part in conferences, but I’ve never received so many photos during a talk! I hope my presentation has inspired many people :)

Another indelible memory from SotM 2017 is the official announcement I gave during a Plenary Session about the next State of the Map conference, that my university (Politecnico di Milano) will host on July 28-30, 2018 in Milan, Italy! It was amazing to make this announcement and get that long, long applause :)

But the most important reason why my participation to SotM 2017 has been great was the interaction with the community, as OSM is all about community! In addition to learning interesting news from the conference presentations (including some exciting ones given by HOT, Google, Apple and Facebook), I had the chance to physically meet many people who have done so much for OSM, to speak with other researchers, to ask questions to people who are doing great things for mapping in developing countries. Interacting with the organizing team was also great: you have made a wonderful job for this conference! Finally, I would like to thank the other scholars, with whom I spent not just a conference but a whole life experience in beautiful Japan. Guys, you will always be part of my history and my heart <3

Participating to SotM 2017 has further inspired me in collaborating for the benefit of OSM and its community. I sincerely hope to build up new collaborations (research, teaching and other kinds of projects) with many people I met, and to be able to help other people in the future with my knowledge and experience. I also plan to become a member of the OpenStreetMap Foundation, because I feel really grateful for the opportunity that was given to me and because I would like to be more involved at the community level.

All in all, this has been one of the best experiences of my life and once again I want to say a big thank to the OSM Foundation to make all this become possible!

Dear HOT members,

my name is Marco Minghini and I come from Como (Italy). First of all, I wish to express my gratitude to Cristiano Giovando for suggesting my name for HOT membership. I would be delighted to become part of such a great community.

I have carried out my studies in Environmental Engineering (specialization in Geomatics and GIS) at Politecnico di Milano, where I obtained a BSc in 2008, a MSc in 2010 (both with honours) and a PhD in 2014. Since then I am working as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the GEOlab (Geomatics and Earth Observation laboratory) of Politecnico di Milano in Milan (Italy).

I am passionate about open source software, that I use everyday in my research activity, and enthusiastic of open data. Since 2015 I am a Charter Member of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) thanks to the contribution I have given in the education, promotion and development of open source geospatial software and open geodata. Despite knowing the OpenStreetMap project since my MSc studies, it was only thanks to my PhD research (focused on Volunteered Geographic Information and Citizen Science) that I really started to study the project, to understand its evolution and impact, to analyse its applications and to use its data. After almost three years since then, I have become an experienced researcher on OSM, particularly on topics such as OSM data quality, OSM contribution patterns and contributors’ motivations, and exploitation of OSM data to derive concrete products like land use and land cover maps.

Soon after my first OSM edit in 2014 I discovered the impressive work of HOT and I started devoting my time as a volunteer of this network. In addition to being a proud humanitarian mapper, over the last couple of years I have been supporting HOT and Missing Maps through the organization of mapathons at Politecnico di Milano (e.g. after the earthquakes in Nepal in 2015 and Ecuador/Japan in 2016) and the provision of support/training to different communities. When organizing these mapathons I had the plasure to know and to personally interact with Tyler Radford and Cristiano Giovando (who gave an exciting live skype call during our event for OSM GeoWeek 2015) as well as Blake Girardot, who often setup customized mapping projects for us. In particular, the kinds of events I am most proud of are the so-called “minimapathons”, that are mapathons for primary school children. Notably, in March 2016 my colleagues and I organized a successful humanitarian mapathon by involving 200 10-year old students in mapping buildings for a project on malaria in Swaziland (see this post on HOT’s blog).

I am also an active promoter of HOT and its activities among my research and professional network. As an example, as the responsible and point of contact of GEOlab for the GeoForAll network, in 2016 I gave a webinar on how to organize a humanitarian mapathon. I have also promoted humanitarian mapping at national events, for instance the 2016 conference of the Italian OSM community (OSMit 2016). In few days (on Friday, February 10) I will give an invited speech on “OSM for emergencies” at OSMit 2017, where I will present the activities of HOT and focus on the mapping effort of the Italian community after the terrible earthquakes occurred in 2016.

Finally, some students at Politecnico di Milano have recently found PoliMappers, an official student association which became the first European node of the YouthMappers network. I was proud that they asked me to become the Faculty Mentor of this association. The activities planned include both field mapping and remote mapping on HOT’s tasks and I have already given some tutorials on how to use OSM mapping tools (until now iD, JOSM and Field Papers). Finally, last year I made my first donation to HOT as I really believe in the value of its activities.

With no doubt I will continue to support HOT in 2017 and beyond. In particular, as I have just become the Secretary of ISPRS WG IV/4 “Collaborative Crowdsourced Cloud Mapping (C³M)” as well as a member of the new EU COST Action CA15212 “Citizen Science to promote creativity, scientific literacy, and innovation throughout Europe”, I plan to make more and more people in these networks aware about the potential of humanitarian mapping using OSM. Thanks to the collaboration with PoliMappers, I will of course continue to organize humanitarian mapping events and provide the required training and support. Finally, depending on the time required, I would like to start being involved in one of the HOT Working Groups – perhaps the one on Training.

My OSM username is mingo23 and my Twitter profile is @MarcoMinghini. Here you can find an updated list of all my activities (such as events organized and papers written) related to OSM.

Thank you very much for your attention and for considering my nomination. Best regards and happy mapping to everyone!

Marco