News — 09 July, 2013

Faces of HOT: Iyan, new Indonesian Team Manager

Yantisa Akhadi, a.k.a Iyan, is the new team manager for the Indonesia project. He has an extensive background with open source software and web development through working at the UNDP and IFRC.
Iyan grew up in one of the hottest cities in Indonesia, Semarang. As a teenager on the brink of internet revolution, he quickly fall in love with ICT and decided to concentrate in Informatics Engineering at Islamic University of Indonesia. After he graduated, he joined IFRC and then move to the UNDP for about 5 years. While working at the UNDP, he became interested in web-based mapping. Thus, he decided to get his Masters in Spatial Information Science at the University of Melbourne.

Yantisa Akhadi, a.k.a Iyan, is the new team manager for the Indonesia project. He has an extensive background with open source software and web development through working at the UNDP and IFRC.

Iyan grew up in one of the hottest cities in Indonesia, Semarang. As a teenager on the brink of internet revolution, he quickly fall in love with ICT and decided to concentrate in Informatics Engineering at Islamic University of Indonesia. After he graduated, he joined IFRC and then move to the UNDP for about 5 years. While working at the UNDP, he became interested in web-based mapping. Thus, he decided to get his Masters in Spatial Information Science at the University of Melbourne.In his free time, Iyan likes to travel with his wife and kid, as well as read newspapers, comics, fiction, etc.

How did you get involved with HOT/OSM?
I heard about OSM a few years ago and was impressed with the idea and how peoples could actively create their own maps. When I heard about HOT vacancy few weeks ago, I applied without hesitation, especially when I know that HOT Indonesia has done lots of cool stuff in the last 2 years.

What had been your experience with learning/teaching OSM?
Well, for now surely I will learn a lot about learning OSM :D. I'm excited that beside learning directly from LearnOSM.org, I'm lucky to be surrounded by the highly experienced HOT Indonesia Team.

What are some ideas you have for expanding the OSM community? Or motivating more people to map?
I would love to see more peoples involve in OSM, one of the ideas is by applying "gamification" into OSM Indonesia community. That is applying game mechanics and thinking to non-game context. But first, before we get into that, we need to identify existing contributor and acknowledge their contributions. An offline event would be interesting too.

What is the greatest challenge you have with OSM?
Despite the growing number of OSM adoption in big corporations (Foursquare, Wikipedia, and Apple), one of the biggest challenges is introducing OSM to common peoples. I often need to explain what OSM is when people ask me where do I work.

What do you think OSM greatest strength is?
I think the greatest strength of OSM is its community, not only those who contribute in the map, but also on other aspects. These people contribute in providing infrastructure (server, network, OS), documentations and administration to ensure OSM work at its best.

Anything else that you think is worth mentioning...?
I believe OSM have big potential in making a real changes to the world we live in. I'm proud that currently I'm being part of it.