I'm Michael Montani, and I am a contributor to OpenStreetMap since 2016. I have been focusing my contributions to the OSM ecosystem mainly in the field of crowdsourcing and capacity building, for which I made some stuff:
I co-founded and led the first European YouthMappers chapter, PoliMappers, at Politecnico di Milano. Back in 2016, as university students, we were gathering once a month and teaching each other open mapping tools we were randomly discovering on the web. Good times!! For Politecnico di Milano I also gave lectures on the extra-curricular course "Humanitarian Collaborative Mapping".
From time to time I volunteer for Wikimedia Italia, which includes all the activities related to OSM Italy. In particular, in 2023 I have been in charge of selecting and certify OSM trainers at the national level, during the first iteration of certification of Wikimedia trainers from Wikimedia Italia. Since 2021 I translate all weeklyOSM articles in Italian on a weekly basis with isoipsa. Additionally, I also delivered a training course on how to map hiking trails to CAI, the national alpine association.
I designed and established a crowdsourcing team helping the UN to produce data on OSM in areas where is needed for its operations, especially on peacekeeping areas, notably Somalia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Central African Republic, Mali, Yemen and Abyei and Kashmir regions, working from the logistic bases of the UN in Brindisi, Italy, and Valencia, Spain.
I advocated within UN colleagues on the benefits of open geospatial data and open-source geospatial software, and enforcing good practices on community engagement and usage of OSM data.
I established the UN Mappers community, composed by around 5000 volunteers worldwide contributing to UN peacekeeping efforts. The community is composed by volunteers from academic institutions, local communities, uniformed personnel from missions, UN staff etc.
We delivered OSM events (mapathons, trainings, presentations) at a rate of 70 events per year, mostly online and interacting with contributors over the World. We built capacities of OSM communities in (forgive me if I forget someone) (no particular order): Somalia, Kenya, Madagascar, Moçambique, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Central African Republic, Sudan, South Sudan, Cameroon, Nigeria, Mali, Ivory Coast, Morocco, Libya, Egypt, Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Romania, Portugal, Poland, Kirghizistan, India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Brazil, Colombia and Bolivia.
We built the UN Maps Learning Hub, one of the few resources online which deliver general purpose educational material on OSM, including quizzes and badges, in several languages, including English, French, Spanish, Portoguese, Italian, Chinese and Arabic.
I am an OSMF Member since 2020 and member of the Local Chapters and Communities Working Group since 2023
I almost always map in Africa, but lately I also like to try to add at least one POI per day with EveryDoor. More difficult than what you can imagine, give it a try!
In the production of some Wikipages, I use/d a bot written in Python (PyWikiBot library). The bot is authorized by the community I'm publishing for. For any unintended misconduction, feel free to drop a message in my talk page. At this stage, I am not currently using this bot.
