Keeping up-to-date, relevant maps, is a challenge for many organizations, especially if they don’t have the in-house capacity, or the resources to systematically maintain geo-spatial datasets that are useful across multiple departments or end-users. This is not an uncommon scenario in many municipal governments in the Philippines.

Over the last several months, the MapAm❤re Initiative in San Juan, have been collaborating with local actors and promoting Free software, especially OpenStreetMap, to communities who are seeking to make the most of what’s possible with Open data.

Last Monday, we’ve successfully concluded a City Mapa-thon for DRR to help the local government, in particular the City Disaster Risk Reduction Management Office in creating and updating the map features necessary for their risk reduction and resiliency programs.

87% of the people who registered for the mapa-thon made it to event. Thank you to everyone who chose to spend their Monday afternoon with us, helping out the city of San Juan.

Thank you, too to the City DRRMO, for hosting the event and making their facilities available for the volunteers.

A big thank you to our generous benefactors who sponsored the pizza and drinks. And a shout-out to Mapillary, for the swags we raffled after the mapa-thon. Maraming salamat!

Mapa-thon edits. Click to view data and details on Overpass Turbo. © OpenStreetMap contributors.

The mapa-thon achieved partial completion of the update/identification of barangay-level DRR facilities (mostly in the first district, prioritized because of population density). The mapa-thon participants were mostly newcomers and beginners to OSM editing, and we invested a significant part of the activity to training them how to use the iD editor. Meanwhile, and apart from coaching the learners, the advance mappers also took part in fixing https://github.com/OSMPH/papercut_fix/issues/13.

We also made use of the photos we captured during our Mapillary run early last month. It was a useful reference for mappers during validation, and when trying to determine location or features.

Mapa-thon Part Deux?

We’ve proposed a possible follow-up mapa-thon on 10th June, hopefully with the same group (to recoup our training investment) before the new school term starts and finally finish working on the remaining barangays. See: https://github.com/mapamore/events/issues/7

Data © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL); Image © MapCraft

The training segment is often mentioned as the least enjoyable portion of the activity, but is a necessary :imp:. We can only strive to make it less boring, and more engaging. It’s proper training that makes it possible to avoid things like the screen grab below from happening in the first place, but then there’s Murphy’s Law. So experienced mappers also play a very important role in validation to ensure quality edits, and in coaching, to show them the ropes.

Change set with inadvertent error Data © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL); Image © OSMCHA

Open Sesame!

With Open data, other applications can add value to the data that mappers contribute and with the OpenStreetMap database acting as the primary repository of the same data. Update once, and make the updates available for everyone else.

OSM Hydrant

> OSM Hydrant: Manila and San Juan Fire Stations and Hydrant Coverage Heatmap

OsmAnd~

The map data may be used off-line, on mobile devices. This OsmAnd screen shot shows the same area, with fire hydrants shown. Useful for fire fighters and emergency responders.

UMap:: A Dynamic, up-to-date map of all San Juan City Fire Hydrants

This Umap shows city hydrants that is retrieved dynamically from the OpenStreetMap database. Orange dots represent high-pressure hdyrants.

Photos

I took a few photos, and shared them here.

GeoBadge

The City Mapa-thon GeoBadge[geoBadge[ issues to participating mapa-thoners.