The CrowdDreaming consortium held a webinar on Open Street maps during ALL DIGITAL week. The purpose of the webinar was to promote the project, but also encourage teachers who are interested in cultural heritage to find new virtual ways of sharing and documenting their cultural heritage.
The webinar aimed to provide a quick introduction to open street maps. It showed how you can make edits in open streets maps, how you can actively map neighbourhoods or city areas using the aerial photography mode. An exercise was featured wherein a monument of cultural heritage significance was shown how it was can be added to the map. The intention was to invite teachers who are taking part in the crowddreaming course to add elements of cultural heritage to Open Street Maps. This would help people visiting or living in their communities to know more about the area and gain awareness of cultural points of interest.
Open Street maps was founded by Steve Coast in the UK in 2004. The basis for inspiration of Open Streets was the Wikipedia and concern about how prominent proprietary map data was growing around the world. Now more than two million people are registered on open street maps. Some of the benefits of the map are how user driven they are. If something is missing on open street maps you can easily add it yourself, and the change is there instantly. OpenStreetMap emphasizes local knowledge. Open Street Maps works faster than google maps for example as the data added to open street maps does not need to be verified by a third party.
As the covid-19 crisis goes on the piloting for the crowddreaming project will be deferred to a time when it will be possible. During this time the consortium will aim to hold more webinars so teacher’s taking part in the crowddreaming MOOC can still stay in the project, but also have a chance to see the other teachers and the different communities emerging in thanks to the project.