The 22nd GIS Day is coming on November 18th, 2020! Initialized by Esri in 1999, GIS Day is an annual event celebrating the wide use of GIS. On this day, celebrating events will be held by geographers and GIS lovers all over the world.
This year, UW’s Department of Geography will hold an event encouraging people to contribute geographic features of COVID-19 facilities to OpenStreetMap (OSM), the most famous community-based map service in the world. As a free editable map, OSM offers everyone a chance to be a map-maker by allowing users to contribute to the map contents in a timely manner. OSM has been adopted by many big companies including Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook, which means that the crowdsourced data will benefit not only the direct end-users of OSM but also many other users who indirectly use the information from OSM. During this special time of the COVID-19 global pandemic, contributing detailed and up-to-date information to OSM will help those who need to make essential travels complete their trips more quickly and safely, thereby helping flatten the curve.
During the event, a workshop on how to contribute geographical data to OSM will be offered (the workshop material can be found here), and then the participants will contribute COVID-19 relevant public health facilities to OSM. We also prepared prizes for those who make substantial contributions – we have three $50 Amazon Gift Cards for the top 3 contributors in our event.
Please register at https://tinyurl.com/uwgisday2020 and join us on November 18th!
