Michael Montani
He is the Crowdsourcing Coordinator for Unite Maps at United Nations Global Service Center (UNGSC) where he coordinates a community of volunteers, UN Mappers, composed by UN personnel on the field (peacekeeping and agencies), academia, local communities and remote mappers. The community edits OpenStreetMap in support of UN Peacekeeping missions and UN Agencies, Funds and Programs.
Formerly, he has been the co-founder of PoliMappers, the first European chapter of YouthMappers and YouthMappers Research Fellow, for which he carried on a research project in Senegal to fight an endemic disease through open data and machine learning.
Over the years, he built capacities of several local OpenStreetMap communities in Africa and developed code around open data analytics and crowdsourcing.
Sessions
UN Maps is a program led by the United Nations Department of Operational Support in support of several peacekeeping and political missions such as UNSOS, MONUSCO, MINUSCA, MINUSMA and UNISFA.
By leveraging internal and crowdsourcing capabilities, UN Maps aims not only to enrich topographic and operational data in UN mission areas but also to provide peacekeeping and humanitarian actors with topographic maps, operational geo-information, search and navigation tools, and imagery and street-level base maps, leveraging OpenStreetMap, the Wikipedia of maps.
In order to achieve its goals, the UN Maps Initiative is building a thriving community around the collection, validation, usage, and dissemination of open geospatial data. This community is called UN Mappers.
It benefits from the established crowdsourcing activities, such as mapathons, training opportunities and other collaborative events involving several stakeholders as the UN staff on the field (peacekeeping and agencies, funds and programs), academia (high schools and universities in Africa, EU and US), local communities and remote volunteers.
Together, the UN Mappers community give substantial support not only in the production of maps and web services but also in the development of innovative applications using virtual reality and data analytics. Some of the results obtained with open data to these applications will be presented during the intervention.
Furthermore UN Mappers are working on translating and updating OSM documentation material in all 6 UN official languages, which is distributed with open license.