Contributions to civil society

How does OSMTracker help communities?

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There are a handful of well-done thematic cartography projects crafted by organized teams around the world, some of which are briefly described here:

1. Empowerment of informal settlements: Erizo Juan Santamaría, Alajuela, Costa Rica.
   This project is officially named "Pilot plan for the empowerment of the population living on informal settlements for the digital self-management of local cartographic knowledge". Beginning back in 2017, a team from Costa Rica Institute of Technology (TEC) based in Alajuela Academic Center lead by Ing. Jaime Gutiérrez Alfaro, Ing. Diego Munguía Molina, social worker Ivannia Valverde Jiménez, Arch. Pablo Acuña Quiel with the support of TEC students, introduced OSMTracker to the locals at Erizo Juan Santamaría community in different workshops since 2018 and by 2021 one of the biggest achievements was the democratic vote of the community for the naming of the streets and alamedas followed by the signposting. [1]
   
   [1] Click here to read the full story
   
2. Maperos Campesinos: The Use of ICTs by and for Victim Communities
   The creation of open source projects, such as Open Street Map has paved the way for people to get into Information and communication technologies (ICT). This is the case of Maperos Campesinos (peasant mappers) in Bajo Cauca, a region of Antioquia, Colombia. Communities like Afro-descendants, indigenous people, peasants, created the group Supervisors of Land Rights in order to claim their rights, due to decades of conflict regarding land use and ownership. One of the solutions that the project achieved was that the residents of Canoa in Bajo Cauca were taught how to map their own territory, and either disseminate it on the internet or reuse it for their own land-use plans. They learned to use the tools, both the tools for fieldwork and the OSM Tracker, Osmand or ‘Afijari’ which are applications for mobile phones. The project had the collaboration of OpenStreetMap Colombia, which was represented by Fernando Castro. [2] Read more
   [3] Read full blog on Medium