The OSM Thailand Community & HOT Meet-up happened on Oct 10, 2026 (right on 10.10 day!). Considering local OSM meetups are quite rare, we decided not to miss it.
After the opening part of the event and introductions, our local OSM coordinator introduced the TechTransThai Mapping Thailand as the most active mapping community in Thailand, and asked us to show what we do.
I started by showing my own OpenStreetMap contributor profile, which has a significant track record of the 30,000+ changes, before going onto TechTransThai side of things.
For TechTransThai Mapping Thailand, I navigated to the campaign’s page, which we listed 3 categories: Satellite Imagery Tracing, Ground Survey, and Indoor Mapping. (although we didn’t have indoor progress for a significant amount of time)
I admit the page was a bit outdated and missing a lot of recent progress at the time of the event. Thankfully, those were documented right on TechTransThai Blog! This made it still quite easy to showcase what we achieved this year: neighborhood mapping along the Chalong Krung Rd. (Bangkok) and Suphan Buri areas, the MaxValu locations, and the 10-temple drive-by POI capture in Suphan Buri.
How does our mapping workflow look like?
The neighborhoods in Ladkrabang, Bangkok and Suphan Buri
We used the classic Satellite Imagery Tracing with iD/JOSM, then followed by an on-ground survey with Every Door/StreetComplete. During the Ladkrabang (Chalong Krung Rd.) demo, the local coordinator also noticed something amazing about OSM: the ability to add unusual routes in there such as canal boardwalks. This is where the data gets useful for things like cycling and finding shortcuts, which do not show up in the mainstream map apps.
Neighborhoods are actually our main focus for 2 reasons:
- It helps with disaster response, such as rescue teams finding ways into a flooded village
- It helps with calculating population density of a given area, based on the number of houses or residential buildings
MaxValu locations
We used to visit the official MaxValu website for store locations (link may be dead now, due to the acquisition by Central Retail), get there physically (or stop there as a part of a road trip), and use field survey tools to add the surveyed information (e.g. opening hours, wheelchair accessibility), before completing the fields later with information from official website with iD when we’re back home.
Suphan Buri 10-temple run
We did the drive-by POI capture, where we go in a car, let the passenger use their phone to take pictures, upload to Wikidata, and use the information (geotags, the picture itself which has signs displaying their names, and the Wikimedia commons entry) to fill map the whole thing remotely via iD later. Interestingly, this one feeds OpenStreetMap and Wikimedia Commons at the same time.
For Q&A, audiences asked which tool did I use. Which I opened my personal website and showed off an old presentation of adding accessibility data on OSM back in 2023. The tools (Vespucci, StreetComplete, Every Door) still applies now though.
So yeah, that’s pretty much it for the OSM Thailand Community & HOT Meet-up. Glad to receive the recognition and we still have more places to map ahead.
Some Late Night Defender’s personal notes
I posted the photo of this meetup event in the OpenStreetMap@Asia Telegram group and a moderator gave a very interesting comment:
I’m honestly quite glad to see your turn-out! 😍 for a change, it appears that women out-numbered the male participants. 👏
That was unexpected, but a very welcome one. The other unexpected thing though, was that I did the whole presentation in Hoshimi Miyabi cosplay.
We need your help
TechTransThai is the work of contributors helping in their free time using their own small budgets, and as we are running low on available contributors, we are being stretched thin. If you like what we do, please consider:
- Joining our chats and say hi, to signal that our projects matter to you.
- Contributing to our projects listed on the website, or reviving archived ones.
- Spreading the word!