Transforming lives through mapping
The State of the Map Africa (SOTM Africa) is an annual regional conference that celebrates the culture of open mapping, open data, GIS and its impact across Africa. The first SoTM Africa conference was hosted by the OSM community in Uganda in 2017.This year’s conference will build on a new strategy envisioned for OpenStreetMap Africa as a renewed, strong, and growing network, and as part of the global open mapping movement.
This year’s conference will provide a diverse and fun space for everyone to collaborate and be a part of the OpenStreetMap Africa community. We will also lay the foundation that will provide us with a solid base for the open, collaborative, and participatory community that we want to build and is needed for our movement to diversify and thrive. We hope you will join us.
Themed ‘Transforming lives through mapping’, we hope to not only share stories of how open and crowdsourced geospatial data is being used to solve real-world challenges but to also discuss on challenges of using such datasets and how we can make OpenStreetMap to be findable, accessible, interoperable and usable. The purpose of the 2019 State of the Map Africa conference is to encourage the community to additionally use the data that they create.
About OSM Africa
OSM Africa is a regional community of contributors, users and supporters of OpenStreetMap from countries within the African continent. This includes mappers, scientific researchers, humanitarians, NGOs, government agencies, small business and global companies having and/or supporting work within the continent.The network is aimed at growing and producing a complete and well detailed map of Africa on OpenStreetMap in order to advance the quality, completeness and sustainability of geospatial data in Africa.