this is about an entry in the weeklyOSM, a piece of news regarding mapping, on which I wished to provide feedback, and did not find how to do so.
what happened?
in the weeklyOSM for the period 15/03/2022-21/03/2022 there was the following “Education” entry:
Youthmappers published their project results about how to connect volunteered geographic information and crowdsourced spatial data with government cartographers and geographers to better serve the public across the Americas.
The piece of news is as copied above, it does not provide contact information. If you open the published article, it is a slideshow, for which »The publisher chose not to allow downloads for this publication«, the publisher seems to be a US-based institution, reachable on social media platforms I don’t use, and one of the activities describes something that happened here in Panama.
There’s very little going on here in OSM-Panama, and I sort of keep track of it, welcoming new users, checking with some diligence the osmose site, or the openstreetmap-history for this area, so I was puzzled, what were they referring to, since I did not see anything going looking like what they described at page 31-32?
my attempts at finding whom to ask.
I first wrote on the OpenStreetMapOrg group on Telegram, and I’m aware it’s not an official channel, but there’s people from the weeklyosm who every week share the updated link to the weeklyOSM. then I wrote to the official email address for weeklyosm.eu. then after another week I wrote to the person who manages the Spanish translation of the weeklyOSM and who posts links to the new ‘semanario’ on the OSMLatam group.
this was helpful, in the sense that Eric Armijo provided a very friendly answer, but we still do not know what was the mapping action described in that issuu presentation.
what next?
I promised to Eric that I would post a topic here, so we can more openly understand each other.
Having read only the linked report, I think you were inferring a connection between OSM and the project in Panama which is not there.
The YouthMapper projects in some other countries used OSM (of course)
The project in Panama did not: Volunteers used a mobile application to add street names to the government’s official geo data.
In general, weeklyOSM just shares links to news, projects, and so on. So if you have questions about a mentioned project, you should contact the original authors rather than the weeklyOSM editors.
The YouthMapper’s PDF links to https://www.youthmappers.org/. From there you can find Chapters › Chapter Listing › Access Chapter Directory. In the table that opens search for Panama and you will find an email address to contact.
you lost me between 1 and 2 …
1: “of course” the YouthMappers project used OSM — elsewhere.
2: and then use the YouthMappers site to reach the Volunteers who worked for the Panamanian institutions without using OSM.
in my email to weeklyOSM I hinted at attempting to provide two links for each entry: the news itself, the OSM username associated to it, wherever possible. and, well, isn’t YouthMappers members a subset of OSM?
On The Other Hand … you may have seen it right, and makes sense. I had noticed with some surprise that —seen from OSM— there was no GIS-Day activity organized by the YouthMappers Chapter at the Universidad de Panamá, so maybe there was their yearly activity, only they decided to keep it outside our organization this year.
if this is so, then I would not bother them —from my OSM perspective— for something which they chose to keep outside OSM.
I think YouthMappers is more like a loose collection of independent chapters at the different universities under a common brand. So I guess that each chapter decides on their own what they work on?
hi again Hermann. we risk shifting the focus on the YMUP Chapter and their motivations, and given my inability to stay in contact with them, I suggest we stay on the original subject, which was, more or less: please weeklyOSM, try to associate a OSM user name for every piece of news that has to do with mapping.
Speaking as an (occasional) WeeklyOSM editor - how on earth are we supposed to do that? Many of the contributions, even when directly related to OSM, don’t have OSM user accounts associated with them.
If you believe that you can do a better job than the current editors please volunteer to help! The current issue contains the following:
“We are always looking for people to help us improve our newsletter so it can get out faster, have more depth and coverage, and generally improve it for our readers, like you. You may see in this issue that some articles are not sufficiently described. We are urgently looking for people who are willing to help write such articles. Get in touch via info at weeklyosm dot eu.”
Right, so we do want to focus on this YMUP Chapter. You see, they refuse to stay in contact with other local OSM mappers. Their former president briefly joined the Telegram group that we were using, then deleted her Telegram account. The next president did the same after some comparatively open messages, which clarified to me their structure and logic. they have another president, maybe this one, maybe not, but the leader is really prof. Adames. They supported splitting the Telegram group (I can’t link you to the new group, because it’s a private group), but as I understand it, they do not use it to keep local mappers informed. (the owner of the private Panama group asked about it in the public Centromérica group.)
bottom line: hinting at contacting them to get any information is not a useful hint.