Room: Talks II - Amphi Bienvenüe (Bienvenüe)
Saturday, 09:30
Duration: 20 minutes (plus Q&A)
Language: en
‘Adopt Your Town’ is a workshop proposed for third-year high school pupils, to be conducted during the 2025/26 school year. The primary target of this initiative is not only to improve OpenStreetMap. This educational project aims to promote a sense of unity and cohesion among pupils and their local community.
Novice users of OpenStreetMap have a different perspective and range of interests to more seasoned users. Consequently, the likelihood of acquiring new data increases. Eventually, this work outlines how the OpenStreetMap environment’s tools can be used as Open Educational Resources (OERs).
The aim of this workshop is, firstly, to enhance participants’ cartography skills and, secondly, focusing on the local community, to highlight aspects that are often overlooked by mainstream mapping services.
Moreover, pupils have created tactile maps of the school campus to assist blind individuals. This was easily and efficiently done using the Touch Mapper tool.
The pupils were enthusiastic about the prospect of creating a map of their own town. They were surprised to discover a database of cartographic information similar to Wikipedia, and they became even more engaged when they realised that they could map a wide variety of subjects, such as trees, benches, and defibrillators. Furthermore, the workshop shifts the focus from commercial-oriented mapping to a more people-centred approach.
Each pupil has identified an area of interest and explored it. Some examined their immediate environment, while others mapped all the beaches in the area, and some even mapped trees and street lamps. Furthermore, some pupils have added house numbers, which in Italy are located on every door and not on every building.
The project was made possible because, in Italy, all third-year high school pupils are required to do a practical project supervised by their teacher or tutor.
The workshop was conducted at the ‘Guglielmo Marconi’ Scientific High School. In the Italian school system, each third-year pupil have to do a project involving real work. In this case, the project focused on mapping the Pesaro’s municipality.
The first step of the project was an introduction to the fundamentals of OpenStreetMap, followed by the allocation of tasks. Each pupil selected items of own interest. However, the participants were encouraged to expand their work beyond the municipal level and map any other geographical areas of interest, such as their place of origin or their holiday destinations.
During the workshop, the primary editor adopted was iD, a user-friendly application native to OpenStreetMap with a rapid learning curve.
Secondly, it was recommended to use mobile applications such as StreetComplete and Every Door, the second especially due to its compatibility with iOS operating systems and because it can add tags during the upload.
The tag is important for the tutor because it helps to identify the team’s contributions within the project.
The ResultMaps platform was used to monitor pupils’ work. ResultMaps is a suite of analytical tools that has become the de facto standard for monitoring and visualising activity and data quality. It provides insight regarding pupils’ activity during workshops.
Each changeset was monitored using the tag #PCTOMarconi2026. The link opens a map covering a large area, because pupils have also mapped regions including the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, the Maldives and Algeria, where they were born or have lived. It is evident that the primary location of the workshop is the town of Pesaro (Italy), with a significant number of changesets having been recorded there.
For the purposes of this workshop, all the 25 pupils have created an account of OpenStreetMap. The tools Your OSM Heat Map and How did you contribute to OSM? were used to display the area mapped by the pupils. Furthermore, Filtering OSM Changesets by a Specific Comment was used for measuring the global progress of the project and the average work of each pupil.
Eventually, the OSMfight tool was adopted for the activity’s gamification. This tool allows two pupils to compare their contributions. These activities are merely games, but they are useful for stimulating pupils in their mapping activities.
The ResultMap tools were used to monitor pupils’ activity while they were working, and later to extract useful statistics and data. From this point of view, the tools can be considered an OER, as it provides educators with a robust toolkit for evaluating pupils’ asynchronous work.
Another significant initiative that merits attention is the ‘Project of the Month’, an instance of Podoma project. The Project of the Month is an informal initiative by the Italian community focused on a specific OpenStreetMap topic each month, subsequently discussed on the OSM Community Forum. This initiative is useful for encouraging pupils to work on a specific topic and to grow a sense of community with others OpenStreetMap users.
From April 2025, the ‘Project of the Month’ will no longer be limited to individual tags but propose a general theme for the month’s mapping, offering badges to those who contribute to the initiative, creating a gamification approach that increases user engagement.
Furthermore, pupils have created tactile maps of the school campus to facility blind and visually impaired people. This was easily by Touch Mapper tool which an example is this, which was improved by helpful of association that are working in this field. This assistance was crucial for adding Braille information about buildings and other areas providing a ‘vision’ to who cannot see.
In this workshop, the pupils discovered an alternative to the conventional mainstream mapping services. OpenStreetMap has a distinct cartographic philosophy, emphasising the principle of collective contribution.
During the workshop, the pupils discovered that with the Open Data it is easy transform users into creators.
Eventually, Pesaro increased the number of map changes by 45,996 units during the first two months of the project. It is evident that pupils made mistakes in their work, but it should be noted that they have only recently started to mapping.
Therefore, it is possible that not all pupils will continue to contribute to OpenStreetMap. However, a significant number of them are enthusiastic about it because they have discovered that, as an Open Database, OpenStreetMap is also theirs. They can improve it whenever they identify a missing or incorrect item.