It has been almost exactly one year since I first signed up for OGF - I found the website in January last year, and I joined and got the email confirming my ownership of AR025 at the start of February, 2014. At that time, there were only two countries available. All the other countries were taken. The OGF world seemed very crowded, but since then, Thilo has weeded the garden substantially. At first I thought I would have preferred a larger country and felt I was late to the party, but in retrospect, even a tiny country is a huge project.

My intention had been to use AR025, which I named Ardisphere after a fictional country I once mentioned in a short story I never finished writing, as a kind of experimental place to perfect my mapping skills and learn the tools. Then I intended to apply what I had learned to focus on my “main” country, Mahhal (AN160). Mahhal is a country I invented in my childhood and has a lot of well-developed background. I want to use OGF to try to recreate a complex “atlas” of Mahhal that I had made on paper which I later lost, but which I recall vividly.

I still intend to build Mahhal, but I am taking it very slowly. I am approaching it perfectionistically and, mostly, “historically” - meaning I want to build the country “in order”: first building the coasts, hydrology and topography, then ecology and plant cover, then agriculture, then hamlets, then cowpaths, then roads, then markets, then towns, then highways, factories, railroads. . . you get the picture. In trying to follow this historical order, however, things go slowly. I have already broken my own “rules” in many cases, e.g. when I went on an airport-building binge, or my detailed work on the capital, Rewk Mahhal.

Anyway, in fact… I have ended up spending about 90% of my time on the Ardisphere. The project took on a life of its own, and despite my disorganized approach, it has ended up pleasingly organic in growth and conception. I have developed a kind “cartographer-crush” on it.

Further, I have learned a lot of new skills, and feel I have become almost a JOSM “expert” in some respects - I am even thinking about maybe trying to make some contributions to OSM for my area of Korea, which isn’t very complete - although my negative past experience contributing to wikipedia makes me wary of trying participate in that kind of project.

My current plan for the Ardisphere is to continue to fill in aspects where a I have a clear idea what I want, but I also want to open up the country to some “managed” collaboration - maybe I could “outsource” the national freeway system to one of the AARoads highway geeks who have recently joined, since I have done very little work on my freeway system so far, partly because I want the route system to emerge organically. I might also try to organize outsourcing specific purpose sites, as I did with my embassies, but larger-scale.

I have an idea to hand out the development of “ethnic enclaves” to other OGF users on an invitational basis, for those who are interested, since the Ardisphere is supposed to be a multiethnic, immigrant country. I do not have sufficient linguistic expertise to build all possible enclaves, which is the only reason there are Koreans but not Chinese, and Welsh but not Germans or Russians. Anyway, if anyone feels inspired, or is thinking, “well, the Ardisphere is ok, but what it really needs is a __,” I just want to say: make me a proposal - I would love to hear from you. As an example: I am beginning to work with Sarepava on a Karolian district in the southeast.

I want to thank everyone in OGF for making a great place to spend so much of my free time. Thanks to Thilo, histor, BMSOUZA, Easky30, tom_m7, joschi81, Keapler, Boge, isleño, Demuth, and Sarepava, who have all been kind collaborators. I have spent a lot of time “lurking” and looking at and learning from other people’s work. Therefore, I offer thanks to the inspiring, detailed map work of users like clik, indyroads, Paxtar, JBstad1, Subway, JSanchez, Yiyi, waa, Danny11, Tamarindia, NE2, Andy, dono87, BelpheniaProject, jak, antoon, EMKLI, KVh, and bhj867, too. Finally, double extra thanks to Thilo for his generous technical support and effort.

During this past year, I celebrated my first anniversary of the successful surgery and radiation for the cancer that I was diagnosed with in 2013. Discovering OGF as I emerged from that trauma has been a nice break from “reality.” It’s good to be alive.

Happy mapping, chau & 안녕. . ./ luciano

(tl;dr: thanks, everyone.)