We’re heading up next month to the American Geographical Society’s Geography2050 again this year, which will be my 4th one, and the 5th annual overall. It’s always a great event — a diverse crowd in attendance and a chance to catch up with a lot of old friends.

The last two years the AGS has hosted and led an OpenStreetMap mapathon in conjunction with the event to promote OSM as a tool in education. It’s organized and led by TeachOSM, and they invite 50+ AP Geography teachers from around the country to learn how to work with OpenStreetMap in their classrooms as a teaching aid. Alongside Steven Johnson and Richard Hinton (who do the real work behind TeachOSM), I’ll be helping out as a volunteer to lend my knowledge of OSM and its editing tools to the group.

I’ve always been a JOSM power user (like CAD for mapping), but I’m sure for this exercise we’ll do things with the built-in editor, iD, and maybe some HOTOSM mapping tasks for aid work. I’ll need to brush up on the latest and greatest with iD. I follow the project on GitHub and have seen tons of activity going on lately.

It’s been a long time since I’ve done anything in OSM at all, especially in a mapathon group setting. It’ll be a refreshing opportunity to get to do some mapping again and to support such a great cause to promote geography education.