TEDxManagua is a independently organized TED event happening in Nicaragua. This year, I participated with my talk in Spanish language “The map is in your hands” (El mapa está en tus manos), about maps in a country where the streets have no name, community initiatives by active citizens and building the first map of Managua’s public transportation system.

The talk was an entertaining resume of our work in the Free Software communities, especially within the OpenStreetMap Nicaragua group where we have done great progress over the last year:

We developed support for the local way of building addresses: with reference points, instead of street names. We started building collectively the best online map of the country and we are on the project of mapping for the first time completely the capital’s public transportation system. Even ideas to map informal spaces in the city, such as the Mercado Oriental, the biggest marketplace of Central America, have been risen within the interdisciplinary group of people working together.

It is all about improving your own environment, using new technology to leverage things that could not have been done before in this participatory way. Not waiting for anybody to do what makes life better, just get together, use the tools available, learn from each other and make things happen – technology available to the people.

Unfortunately the organizers had serious technical problems, therefore most of the videos of this year’s event have not been published. If I was lucky and my video will still get out, I will publish it here.