Report 2023 – Wikimedia Italia(Italian Local Chapter OpenStreetMap)

In this report it is possible to find a summary of some of the activities organized,financed or supported by Wikimedia Italia during 2023 as the OpenStreetMap Local
Chapter.
Wikimedia Italia supports the volunteer communities that contribute to Wikimedia andOpenStreetMap projects within the Italian territory. It does so by offering funding
opportunities, training opportunities or meeting moments. Everyone can join andcollaborate in the production of shared knowledge. Wikimedia Italia supports projects
to strengthen communities in their activities both online and offline, to make them growin the number of members and in skills and ensure generational continuity.
You can find most of the activities mentioned below, in detail (in Italian language),archived in the associations wiki: https://wiki.wikimedia.it/wiki/OpenStreetMap/Attivit%C3%A0/Archivio

Grants for volunteers' projects 2023
The grants for volunteers' projects aims to support the implementation of projects,
proposed by volunteers, Wikimedia Italy members and non-members, active in
Wikimedia and OpenStreetMap projects with budgets from €1,000 up to €10,000.
The volunteer selection committee, composed of 6 people, received 7 proposals anddecided to fund 3 of them, of which 1 was related to OpenStreetMap. The total budget
approved for the implementation of 3 projects was 15,205 € of which 7,930 € for theOpenStreetMap proposal that can be found below:
BikingImprover https://bikingimproverday.it/
The objective of the project was to develop a web application to provide an effective
and alternative tool, based on a gamification approach, for improving and enriching theOpenStreetMap database and for organizing events focused on the topic of urban

cycling. These events are useful for collecting data such as dedicated cycling lanes
and cycling-related points of interest (drinking water sources, etc.).

Microgrant program
The microgrant program aims to support the implementation of projects, proposed byvolunteers, Wikimedia Italia members and non-members active in the Wikimedia andOpenStreetMap projects, up to an amount of €1,000.
The program funded a total of 31 projects submitted by 20 different volunteers.
Activities funded through the microgrant program involved 6 proposals related toOpenStreetMap for a total of €4041 spent.

Coordinators
Coordinators are volunteer roles among Wikimedia Italia’s members who promote andsupport Wikimedia and OpenStreetMap initiatives. They are the association's point ofcontact in different regions in Italy. Each coordinator has a pre-approved fund of 500
euros available for expenses that can be used for any kind of activities related to theircoordinator role or activities related to Wikimedia and OpenStreetMap.
In 2023 Wikimedia Italia had a total of 18 coordinators, 5 of them wereOpenStreetMap coordinators.

GEOdaysIT 2023
Also known as FOSS4G-IT/OSM-IT from its previous editions, is the national gatheringof Free Geospatial data enthusiast and OpenStreetMap contributors in Italy.
In 2023 a new event was organizeed and it included FOSS4G-IT, OSM-IT and AIT
convention, it was nominated GEOdaysIT, was held in Bari from June 12 to 17 andwas co-organized by AIT ( Associazione Italiana di Telerilevamento), GFOSS.it,
Wikimedia Italia, University of Bari and Bari Polytechnic University.
About 300 people attended the event and there was a much more balanced gender
gap than previous years. Seven workshops were held and 30 lecturers were involvedin organizing the workshops, which were attended by more than 50 people. The event
had the support and sponsorship of 9 organizations and 8 sponsors.

Wikimedia Italia organized and participated through staff, coordinators, and volunteers
in various sessions: an opening panel on the future of FOSS4G-it and OSMit nationalevents; several presentations related to OpenStreetMap and Wikimedia Italia; an OSM
roundtable with community members; the OSM community day, in which thecommunity was given free space to present various individual projects; and amapathon organized entirely by 8 women mappers from the cOSMopolIT group (3 ofwhom participated thanks to Wikimedia Italia grants).
Wikimedia Italia provided a budget of €8,000 for the overall realization of the event.

GEOdaysIT 2023: event participation grants
10 participation grants of EUR 500 each were provided for GEOdaysIT 2023, and theapplications received were evaluated by a committee of OSMers, including
coordinators (2 men and 3 women). Ten applications were received and 10 peoplewere awarded the scholarships, 2 of whom forfeited their scholarships for personalreasons. Four women and four men participated in GEOdaysIT with presentations, orby helping to organize activities. The budget spent was €3,700.

Participation grants for State of the Map Europe
From November 17-19, 2023, the international event of the European OpenStreetMap
community was held in Antwerp, Belgium. Five participation grants were awarded for a
total expenditure of approximately €2,920.

IT tools for the Italian OpenStreetMap community
Wikimedia Italia wants to facilitate the Italian OpenStreetMap community in their
mapping activities, that is why the association has developed and maintains different
tools and services such as the Italian OpenStreetMap website, the Italian Tasking
Manager and the OpenStreetMap Extraxts, that are available for the whole community
to use freely. The budget spent for these services in 2023 was €17,355.

- Italian OpenStreetMap website
A website has been created that aims to support the Italian mapping community withsome essential services such as a base map and some different styles of datavisualization. The site is a container of some of the tools already present and available
to the Italian OpenStreetMap community. The website had 13,434 visits in 2023 and it
is currently an ongoing work,for the implementation of two different display styles formaps, "Italian" and "hiking."- Tasking Manager and OpenStreetMap Extracts
Tasking Manager is an interface through which individual contributors can work inteams to produce mappings that feed into the OpenStreetMap project.
OSM extracts: are files that contain OpenStreetMap data for individual continents,
countries, and metropolitan areas. It is possible to download the data from all overItaly, by region, province or municipality in various formats (GPKG - OGC
GeoPackage, PBF - Protocolbuffer Binary Format, OSMAND OBF - OsmAnd BinaryMaps Format) depending on the scale.
It has an average of 100 visits per week and is constantly updated and maintained by
Wikimedia Italia.

Turkey and Syria Earthquake Mapathon
Following the earthquake of February 5 and 6, 2023, an event was organized tosupport humanitarian mapping through the projects already open in the Humanitarian
OpenStreetMap Team Tasking Manager. Approximately 20 people attended the event,but the community was also active on its own afterwards to help with post-earthquake
mapping.

OpenStreetMap mapping party at MERGE-it 2023
On May 14, after the MERGE-it event, organized in Verona by various free software
volunteer communities. Wikimedia Italia organizaed an OpenStreetMap mapping party
where 10 people actively participated in the mapping and about 20 people in themeeting since other members of the various communities who were participating in theparallel session (hackathon) also joined. The organization expenses were covered by
the microgrant program.Agency mobility environment territory (AMAT) agreement
An agreement between AMAT and Wikimedia Italia is in place to identify an effective
tagging methodology and the inclusion on OpenStreetMap of available data related tomobility infrastructure such as road network graph, cycling infrastructure, sidewalks,and architectural barriers. There will then be a focus on studying the tagging of routes
within subway stations, a topic that is little addressed throughout cities. In 2023, thenational OpenStretMap coordinator organized several activities with AMAT and on afew occasions with TomTom and Meta to map and improve data in OpenStreetMap.
During the events, correction and improvement of the pedestrian network previously
entered into OSM by AMAT was carried out.

Bologna Women's Center
This is the documentation, research and initiative center for women in the city ofBologna; it includes the Italian Women's Library and the Women's History Archive. In
2023 it hosted 4 events, organized and run by regional volunteers and aimed at
integrating documentation related to the women of Bologna on Wikimedia andOpenStreetMap projects.

Wiki-imparare 2022-2023 (school grants)
Thanks to Wikimedia Italia's financial support during the 2022/2023 school year, four
projects in as many schools were funded for a total of 12,000 euros. In Trentino-Alto
Adige, Abruzzo, Puglia, and Lombardy, teachers and project volunteers brought theWikimedia, Vikidia, and OpenStreetMap projects into classrooms to make learning
more interactive and fun and to engage students in the production of free knowledge.
Two of the projects involved OpenStreetMap:

*at Istituto Comprensivo Morosini Manara in Milan, students and students virtually
set out to discover Darwin's journey, mapping its stages on OpenStreetMap andrecreating its itinerary on Wikivoyage. The nature theme was also deepened bymapping the school's trees and describing their species on Vikidia.
*at Don Lorenzo Milani High School in Acquaviva delle Fonti, consistent with theneeds expressed by the municipality itself, the historic center of Acquaviva delle Fonti
was mapped through the use of field papers and StreetComplete. Specific attention
was paid to the mapping of dry stone walls and wells, an integral part of the cultural
heritage not yet documented on online maps.