Last year I motivate my team to send a proposal to HOT Microgrant they don’t talk or write in English often and they have a discomfort getting out of the bubble but I encourage them, this work is all about Territorial arrangement plans. I think this is the most important field where to work right now in Colombia because many municipalities don’t even have a map to create this plan that is mandatory.

Sometimes I feel That I’m doing all this outside networking alone, but it worth it, because I feel more connected to the Latam community and I want to contribute to visualize not only the Colombian community work, also the Latam community work and contribute to the succession that is happening, the people that begin this process 10 years ago are tired, busy or disconnected they give us the most powerful basis now I want to help empower youngers and consolidate the work, the portfolio and connections .

At the beginning of the process with the HOT Microgrant, I as microgrant lead and head of communications, began to make connections, this was my first alert about my role in this process, questions about what happens with the contacts I make personally on behalf of the foundation, and how to leave a good detailed record that can be accessed by any member if needed, also as we began to receive technological equipment, such as GPS, cell phones, projectors and elements for the drone I began to think about how to make a detailed inventory and put this equipment at the service of the community with a loan protocol and a person in charge of each equipment with their contact details.

About the contact network, my proposal for the FOSCo has been to create and feed another valuable registry that becomes an important asset, and when is not well referenced with a follow-up and good traceability on who made the contact, in what context, what was achieved or what is being worked on, and of course all the contact data like phone number, mail etc; can create misunderstandings and loss of important processes. I believe that it is very important to recognize that when any member make a contact when representing a community, can do it in part thanks to the work that the community does, that although there are also implicit personal skills, management, and logistics participating in events, congresses or in the day today. These contacts exist thanks to the community activity context and therefore belong to it; when a person leaves a community, stop working and has done a job with institutions or people creating networks and if this person doesn’t let the knowledge to another community member, processes lost, contacts are difficult to recover and sometimes, if work is to be restarted, to recover this network It’s necessary to start all over again.

At this moment the board of directors of the foundation and the active members discusses the possibility to put private or public this contact network; maybe a part of the data of these networks should be open or be for community internal use only, we would like to receive the comments of those who want to participate in this discussion.

To resolve the questions about equipment I created the value Inventory registry https://fosm.openstreetmap.co/s565, in this record we carry the data related to the reference of the equipment, a photo, the number of units, the person in charge and how the equipment can be accessed if required by any person in the community for its own purposes such as giving workshops, talks or doing fieldwork. Inside the main work team we have talked about this equipment ownership, often they are lost in time; knowing who has them and what utility does it give to the equipment is very important to strengthen communities, we think that by keeping this register, those responsible for having them can be renewed when the current manager is no longer giving them constant use or cannot put them at the community service. Keeping this record, we feel, gives the ability to the entire community to carry out an audit, to require the equipment when it is considered and to know which are the assets that belong to the community and also know who has better skills to use them. The person in charge is always, on a provisional basis, the aptest to generate value through the element of which he is responsible.

Work with the HOT team in this process show to FOSMCo team a path to measure and communicate the achievements in a consolidated way; tools like the Self Evaluation Matrix Allow us to project our advances and visualize them, now we are thinking how to continue and propose similar tools with more integration features that allow us to have these figures in data using formats such as JSON to make periodic data visualizations and have consolidated numbers that are also an important asset for our work and for OpenStreetMap community in general.