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News — 04 February, 2022

hot_tech_talk | Jan 22

Tldr;

  • Welcome to Kristen (android engineer), Leen (senior product manager) and Petya (tech collective facilitator); three new members joining us at hot_tech this month.

  • hot_tech has a new vision ‘just tech to connect people and places’ There’s a lot of ‘new’ this year for hot_tech, including new vision, new direction, new projects.

  • Kathmandu Living Labs are officially our first ever ‘collective’ partners. And will be the new official Tasking Manager maintainers.

Hi all,

To better get the word out about what hot_tech is up to, each month I’m going to sit down and reflect and share the fruits of our labour so people can see what we’re working on, who’s working on it and how you can get involved. I’m sure these will evolve over time, so consider this a starting point.

Speaking of starting, we had three new team members join hot_tech this month. Kristen Tonga, who joins as our first ever android engineer; Leen D’hondt, who joins us as our new Senior Product Manager; and Petya Kangalova who is our new tech_collective facilitator. Welcome all! You can read more about them in an upcoming welcome blog I will put out next week. Very happy to have them all on board and when you read the blog, you’ll realise just how fortunate we are to have them all with us.

In addition to the new team members, this year brings a lot of new things for us at hot_tech. A new vision, a new direction and new projects (actually some are old, we’re just breathing new life into them).

Our new vision is all about bringing it back to basics, the heart of what we are here for. There will be more to come on this, but in short, hot_tech has a very simple core purpose:

Just tech to connect people and places.

There’s a lot bundled up in this statement, and over the next little while you’ll hear much more from me about what this means and why it matters. But for now, I’ll start with some examples of how we are doing it, now and in the future.

As some of you know, last year we made the intentional decision to redirect our energy toward the newly formed open mapping hubs. We called this the hub_tech redirect. This is now well underway, with shared meetings, upcoming visits, shared OKRs and new collaborations (see announcements below). Although these are small steps, we believe they will lead to big things.

The last new thing is our projects. After the success we had seeding Galaxy last year (and can I say fun, Ramaya, or is it too soon?), we are now in the position to spend some time bringing some of our .in module projects (Tasking Manager, OpenAerialMap etc) back into the spotlight.

In addition to a new integrated design concept for our .in module, we will be giving some much deserved love to the Tasking Manager, an OAM redux and some very exciting (but I can’t talk about it yet, right Omran?) AI-assisted mapping experiments.

I think that probably captures the headlines and probably people have stopped reading by this stage, so thanks for getting this far! I hope you’ve enjoyed the first installment of hot_tech_talk, and I’ll see you in the next one.

Bo \Tech >dir

#Announcements:

  • Welcome Kathmandu Living Labs as the new Tasking Manager Maintainers!! hot_tech are redirecting our resources into other tech collectives within our priority regions and KLL is the first member of the hot_tech_collective!

  • Next Galaxy working group meetings will be: Tue Feb 15, 1600UTC / Wed Feb 16, 0900UTC

  • The call is still open for a TM community caretaker. You can read about it here Please reach out if you’re interested

#Project updates:

  • Galaxy - work continues on improving the mapathon reports and exploring data quality reports. We also just began a partnership with the Harvard Tech for Social Good team to undertake a UX project for the front end.

  • Tasking Manager - As mentioned above some much needed maintenance and tlc has just begun, so hopefully things will be improving before your very eyes soon. Now is also a good time to add any issues to the TM GitHub so they can be integrated into the planning.

  • OAM - We are in the final stages of selecting a partner to support with an OAM redux redesign. If you are an OAM user and would like to join in the design phase, let us know please reach out!