State of the Map Africa 2021

Best Practices for Meaningful Online Sessions with Open Geospatial Communities
11-19, 11:25–12:25 (UTC), Room 1
Language: English

The Workshop aims to gather and engage different open geospatial communities and members to crowdsource learning experiences and best practices in designing and/or co-designing virtual sessions (such as mapathons, workshops, webinars, etc) to create meaningful engagement and open dialogues for and with the participants. This is also a venue to discuss how we can ensure inclusive and accessible online sessions for all.


To avoid physical contact during the pandemic, various organizations and communities switched to online or virtual events to conduct workshops or seminars (“webinar”), training and workshops. Even before the pandemic, the HOT* Community Working has been conducting online events such as mapathons, workshops and webinars to provide space for and with local communities to present and showcase local projects, as well as to open spaces for dialogues and debate about pressing issues with the open mapping ecosystem.

The HOT* Community Working has documented some learnings in conducting engaging and collaborative online events (link: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Community_webinar_learnings), and we would like to share it with other open geospatial communities, as well as to learn from them. We aim to crowdsource positive learning experiences and best practices in designing and implementing engaging and accessible virtual sessions for and with the global open geospatial community.

We also aim to discuss how we can ensure welcoming and inclusive online sessions (mapathons, workshops, webinars, etc), in terms of language, platforms used, time zones, among others, and how to gather feedback from our participants.

Geoffrey Kateregga is the Community Manager at Eastern and Southern Africa Open Mapping Hub of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team. Geoffrey has been working with HOT since 2015. He is also an active member of the OpenStreetMap Africa community - a network of local OpenStreetMap communities from all over Africa organizing State of the Map Africa and joining hands to share resources and collaborate to grow and produce a complete and well-detailed map of Africa on OpenStreetMap in order to advance the quality, completeness, and sustainability of geospatial data in Africa.

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