In mid-September, we applied to HOT’s community development microgrant, and HOT, appreciating our efforts so far, included us in the program. Our project’s aim is to add Turkish language support to OpenStreetMap related tools, to translate the existing OpenStreetMap documents into Turkish and to expand the infrastructure of Yer Çizenler’s volunteer base while considering gender equality and community diversity.
Our active volunteer team, consisting of 8 female university students provided Turkish language support to the HOT’s Tasking Manager and has been sharing the Turkish edition of the weekly OpenStreetMap newsletter called WeeklyOSM for nearly a year. After starting the documentation process, Youth Season Association, which aims to promote the mobility of young people, intercultural dialogue and non-formal education, started a project with similar goals called Open Source Volunteering and we decided to execute the program together. In this way, we have greatly increased the number of active participation in the program.
Within the scope of the program, we have organized 7 online workshops and interviews where we hosted guests from the Turkish and International OpenStreetMap Community. We held weekly coordination meetings and asynchronous translation sessions, in which more than 100 individuals have participated. At our events, we shared information and talked on open source and Wiki philosophy, OpenStreetMap, Wikipedia, community culture, humanitarian mapping and women’s participation & role in the OpenStreetMap community.
We covered the use of WeeklyOSM editor OSMBC, Transifex, iD Editor, MapRoulette and Wikipedia editor in our workshops. With the support of our volunteers, we have published 12 weeklyOSM issues since the beginning of the program. In this way, all our followers can follow the developments and latest news in the OSM world weekly.
The number of members of the Turkish translation team reached 44 on Transifex. We completed the translation of iD Editor by translating nearly 50,000 words and we reached 15% in the verification phase.
In the continuation of the program, we added Turkish language support to the tool called Maproulette, which is a gamified approach to fixing OSM bugs that breaks common OpenStreetMap data problems into micro tasks. Other tools such as JOSM Vespucci and uMap will follow this process.
We know that the Turkish OSM community continues to grow and Turkish OSM documents do not meet this potential. We will continue to organize workshops about OpenStreetMap-related tools, add Turkish language support to these tools, and conduct interviews with participants from the international community in order to further expand our existing volunteer network and fully integrate them into the international community.
We would like to thank Sophie Mower and Geoffrey Katerrega from HOT for their unlimited support in this process, the entire Youth Season Association and the volunteer team, especially Said Türksever, and finally, the volunteers of Yer Çizenler.
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