With a vision to make the first year students aware of OpenStreetMap and knowing its growing use, Geomatics Engineering Students’ Association of Nepal (GESAN) organized two days training running through June 1st and 2nd 2018 at Pashchimanchal Campus, Pokhara. The trainers for the programs were primarily faculty professors and senior students.
OpenStreetMap(OSM) is a collaborative project to create a free editable map of the world. First created in 2004, OSM now has over 2 million registered users, who can collect data using manual survey, GPS devices, aerial photography and other free sources. OpenStreetMap is built by a community of mappers that contribute and maintain data emphasizing on their local knowledge. It is the OSM users who add, remove or edit data maintaining flexibility of the maps.
During the early session of the first day, presentations on general knowledge and information about OSM were given to the trainees by Er. Saurav Gautam citing OSM development, working procedures and its applications. After the presentation session, students were provided with an OSM tracker in their mobile phone and taught about it. Of 48 students, 8 groups were formed each having 6 members. Likewise, the whole college area was partitioned into 8 of nearly equal parts. Afterwards, each group were given the task to map one of the 8 particular areas.
On the second day of the training, we principally focused on processing of the data acquired the day before. The training session was conducted by the senior students along with the members of GESAN. The training proceeded with a question-answer session, multimedia clips, and experience sharing of the trainers.
OpenStreetMaps community is diverse and growing everyday. The cause for the everyday growing use of Open Street Maps is its user friendly interface as well as its easier edit ability.
The training program was found to be very effective and the trainees were very positive about it. GESAN is very thankful to all the trainers who donated their valuable time and made the program what it turned out to be. The main aim of the program was to motivate the young students to get engaged in mapping and we look forward to organize the akin programs in the days to come.
Aman K.C. is currently enrolled in Geomatics Engineering at the Institute of Engineering Pashchimanchal Campus, Pokhara. Besides academics, Aman has been been serving as a secretary of Geomatics Engineering Students' Association of Nepal (GESAN) YouthMappers chapter of the IOE at Tribhuvan University, Pashchimanchal Campus.