Yesterday morning, our OSM community in Metro Manila, conducted an AlayData event for the quarter. We gathered to celebrate Open Data Day, focusing on open geopsatial data from OpenStreetMap, and give ourselves opportunities to socialize and get to know other contributors, sharing stories and experiences, and a chance for hands-on learning with new tools.

Among the things that our community learned from a “getting to know you” survey we did last quarter, is the high interest in other aspects of the OSM movement: like field mapping, photo-mapping, and getting familiar with other tools available from the OSM ecoysystem, and to more casual opportunities to contribute other than arm-chair mapping.

The volunteer group was sub-divided into three teams of their choice:

• Galúgad - folks also on foot, using FieldPapers, for a no-tech mapping approach. In Filipino, “Galúgad” means travelling to explore, or search for something.
• Tahák - folks on foot, using StreetComplete_EE (SCEE). “Tahák” in Filipino means to pass through a new or unusual path.
• Padyák - folks on HPVs (in our case, just bikes), to collect ground-level photos, to support or augment map editing. “Padyák” in Filipino means to stomp, and by extension, to pedal or push with your foot.

Initial results

Here’s the latest heatmap of recent edits made in the area:

During the ice-breaker, two YouthMapper club reps (finally!) mapped the location of their clubs in OSM 🤭. That’s two down, and 15(?) more to go.

We expect more edits to come in soon, as FieldPaper snapshots gets uploaded and editing gets started:

Photos of some FieldPapers Snapshots

Same for the collected imagery:

Screenshot of areas where ground imagery that’s been uploaded, so far.

When the contributor is not sure about what they’re doing, they’ve been adding helpful notes with images include:

Next steps

We were (pleasantly) surprised to find extensive improvements going on in Intramuros, and the pedestrianization of certain road segments, but at the same, it made it more challenging to navigate certain roads within the walled city.

They’ve also added dedicated cycleways, and many of routes we depended on for routing were out of date.

Over refreshments (thanks for supporting the activity, Kaart!) we had to chance to gather informal feedback from participants (activity was “too short”, we’d like to do this again, option to chat/ask questions to fellow participants, etc), most were positive, and many are valuable additions we can incorporate in future activities.

Some of us thought that we probably should give Intramuros another go in a few months. By then, the road work is probably completed, and we’d have more fun with another tuned-up #AlayData.

Gallery

One last group shot of the participants, before the end of the activity.

Group Photo

Group photos, by team: Galúgad, Tahák, Padyák

Photos by Mark Purio, as shared on Adamson YouthMappers SNS account.

Trivia 🥳

• a participant traveled ~250 km, to join our event.
• our youngest participant is twelve, and came with a guardian.
• a first-time participant, with no prior OSM background, contributed the most number of answers to the SCEE quests
• the most frequent “complaint”: “the activity is too short!”
• we took a small step towards a zero-waste event, minimizing single-use plastic usage, with more than half of the participants bringing their own reusable utensils, food containers and flasks. 🤩

I personally had lots of fun. I haven’t been going to many community activities since the pandemic began, and this was worth the wait.

And it was awesome to hear some of the plans and initiatives the local YM clubs are working on.