OSM-Philippines holds face-to-face mapathon after two years

The OpenStreetMap-Philippines community hosted its first face-to-face mapathon since the pandemic began. It was held in Open Space, Katipunan, last 28 March 2022. It was co-organized by the OSM-Philippines community, Open Mapping Hub - Asia Pacific, Mapbeks, and FNF (Friedrich Naumann Foundation). Because of the pandemic restrictions, most mapping events were purely virtual. Everyone was so excited to meet up in person and do our shared interest, mapping! ;)

The participants from the mapathon were mostly students (BS Geography and BS Geodetic Engineering students from UP Diliman) and long-time community volunteers. It was refreshing to see new and young faces in the mapathon and hear their stories about how they learned about OSM and the community.

We started the event by introducing ourselves since there are new members of the community. It was followed by a series of mapa-talks, such as the introduction of OSM (and the local community) by Feye Andal, a community-managed marine protected area (MPA) mapping project by Maning Sambale, and the Rosas Murals project by Aaliyah Sambale. We were supposed to go out and walk along Katipunan Avenue to conduct mobile mapping using Organic Maps, unfortunately, rains started to pour.

I gave a short presentation about OSM and its practical applications. Nothing too fancy and technical as I did not want to overwhelm the participants just yet :) Deck here!

After my presentation, Sir Maning shared his project with COSCA on mapping their community-managed MPA. Check out their work here!

Meanwhile, Aaliyah shared their crowd-sourced project on mapping the Leni-Kiko 2022 murals in the Philippines. It was fantastic! You may access their work here. If you wish to contribute to the map data, visit their database!

Fun fact: Aaliyah is Sir Maning’s eldest daughter! Mapping runs in the blood, right? ;)

And finally, the most awaited part of the event, the mapathon! Aimon Pangan of AER provided a brief introduction about their project on COLLABDev, HOT Tasking Manager, and the iD editor. He also did a quick demo of how to digitize buildings using the iD editor.

Of course, food was served! Mapping gets better while munching on pizza and chips, anyway!

On behalf of the OSM-Philippines, I would like to thank our participants for joining us! I would also like to thank our sponsors for supporting us! We hope to see you again next month ;)

PS. Thank you, OSM-PH, Mapbeks, and YouthMappers for the freebies!

To access the photos from the mapathon, please visit this repository.