Yesterday, the Peruvian President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski visited our team in Ayacucho, Peru, where he learned about Mapbox and worked on his first OpenStreetMap edit, contributing to the largest open geographic database in the world.

The visit focused on how maps and open data play a key role in economic development, urban planning, and disaster preparedness. The president spoke with our team about Mapbox’s roots serving international development projects, the importance of open source, and the many ways these tools can support public service projects. We showed the president the OpenStreetMap platform, talking about our humanitarian work with HOT and how this platform supports disaster relief around the world.

We talked about the strong and active community of mappers we’re building in Ayacucho and Peru. The President expressed his excitement and his own personal interest in supporting this region by improving broadband internet across Peru and developing a strong industrial sector in the area in the long term.

“In Peru, we have completed the national broadband fiber glass network. This will allow everyone in the country to get online. Today, we’re just missing the last connections. And we can make that happen very quickly; the hardest part of the job is now done.”

The visit wrapped up with the president’s first-ever edit to OpenStreetMap: a building he recognized was missing around his neighborhood. With this edit, he joined the millions of users who contribute their own local knowledge and experience to the global database. We were honored to share our enthusiasm for OpenStreetMap with the President. Our team in Ayacucho has collectively added over 1 million edits to OpenStreetMap from our home base in the south-central sierra of Peru.

The president spoke to us about his 6 priorities, many of which can directly benefit from the use of open-source data. We walked through a crime map of Ayacucho and a deforestation map of the Amazon as examples of how maps can be applied to support high-level decision making in education, security, environment and infrastructure development — among others.

Our global team celebrated Kuczynski’s support as he referred to himself as a geography nut, promising to share his passion for maps and his new mapping skills with his family. At Mapbox, we are thrilled to continue our work in the region, supporting OpenStreetMap, and helping to build a mapping community to create the map of the future.

“So when we travel across Perú, we will take a look at OpenStreetMap to see if the places we’re in are mapped and, if they are not, we’ll add them!”