Reflections on teaching OpenStreetMap & other open map tools

Last week, I had the pleasure of helping a bit with the delivery of a workshop on “open tools for the production and use of cartographic data” in Venado Tuerto, that Silvina Meritano organised as part of her role as community ambassador for the UN Mappers. The workshop was supported and co-organised by the local municipal government, the Instituto Católico de Enseñanza Superior, the local branch of Cáritas and the Maná association, and managed to get more than 80 people interested in using maps, from a wide range of social organizations! Split over two evenings and one morning, the workshop covered both remote and field mapping, using maps, as well as contributing directly to OpenStreetMap (OSM) and using OSM as a base-layer to enable individual map use cases. As always with workshops, some things worked better than others, and I thought it would be valuable to share some of the reflections about some of the technical and socio-technical challenges we encountered. If only to document…