I grew up in Nepal. Hills everywhere. Roads that don’t exist on any map. Communities that satellites can barely see through the cloud cover. When I first heard about OpenStreetMap, I thought: this is exactly what those places need.

That was a few years ago. Since then I’ve spent over 300 hours mapping, not because someone paid me to, but because I kept thinking about the person who might one day need that road to exist on a map before they could get help.

How I Started: Before I knew what OSM was, I was already messing around with maps, visiting new places, uploading photos to Google Maps, adding names, leaving notes about locations. I liked documenting places. That habit slowly turned into something bigger.

A hackathon in college introduced me to humanitarian mapping. That’s when it clicked: mapping wasn’t just a tech thing. It was about making communities visible.

My background is electrical engineering. My job is in the cable car sector. Neither screams “mapper.” But when you work in mountain infrastructure, you see how much depends on accurate geographic data, withdrawal routes, access to remote villages, disaster response. The gap between what exists on the ground and what exists on a map is sometimes jarring.

I’ve actually validated more tasks on HOT than I’ve mapped myself, which felt strange at first. But validation matters as much as mapping, maybe more. A wrong building polygon in a flood response map doesn’t help anyone.

On Women and Mapping: Most mapping events I’ve attended, online or in-person, are heavily male. So is the leadership in local OSM chapters. But whenever a woman shows up and starts contributing, the quality is often excellent. Careful, methodical, detail-oriented. And then they disappear. Not because they lost interest, usually because no one made space for them to stay.

… See full entry