“Map Mitrovica!” – a review

On November 21, 22 and 29 the CBM project “Map Mitrovica!”, organized by two CBM interns, Jan Behrens and Lisa Schäder, took place. The project’s overall aim was to bring people from Mitrovica together to work collaboratively on an improved city map and to make them familiar with the online mapping project “OpenStreetMap” (OSM).

On the first workshop day on November 21, the participants learned how to work with OSM and became familiar with basic mapping techniques. After field mapping in the city of Mitrovica, the afternoon was spent doing first OSM edits. On the second workshop day participants had the opportunity to collect more data in different areas of Mitrovica and continued improving the map using their newly gained knowledge. New participants were welcomed and introduced to OpenStreetMap, so they could easily join the mapping activities. During the follow-up workshop on November 29 some of the previous participants gathered again and learned about advanced mapping techniques such as mapping with GPS and camera, which were immediately tested in practice.

All in all, 10 participants joined the mapping activities and became members of the OpenStreetMap community. 8 of them were from Mitrovica, 1 from Prishtina and 1 from Zvečan. 4 of the participants were female, which is a good number considering that around 98% of OSM members is male. Altogether more than 3000 map changes were made during the mapping activities. Plenty of shops, institutions, NGO offices, restaurants, cafes and further facilities were added to the map, several streets were newly drawn and names added. The map of Mitrovica improved remarkably on both sides of the River Ibar/Iber. Although, especially in the northern part of Mitrovica, the map is not yet fully completed, “Map Mitrovica!” laid the foundation for on-going OSM activity in Mitrovica and further improvements of the city map. “You somehow get addicted to it”, one participant said about OpenStreetMap editing.

To see the online map of Mitrovica on OpenStreetMap, click here.