OpenStreetMap
The pandemic changed the OSM-PH community plans for the year in 2020. In person meetups became online and we had to adjust our big plans for this new approach. I collected the publication materials we posted in our social media account to get a broad sense of what we did last year.
The montage above is a small collection of them. Some highlights.
At OpenStreetMap related conferences, I always look forward to the technical talks so that I can learn and improve my mapping skills. Equally important are the community building talks, this gives me great perspective on how mapping communities are nurtured around the world especially for countries whom I share the local context and culture.
For a crowdsourcing online community like us, however, community stories are often relegated as side tracks or lightning talks in a smaller room. If we truly believe that the strength of OSM is the community, these stories should be front and center in our interactions especially during conferences.
This is what we tried to do within our own community events. Here are two events I helped co-organized that is aimed at increasing the audience listening to our community stories.
State of the [country] talks are plenary sessions in the State of the Map Asia in 2016.
We decided that all country status reports at SoTM-Asia in 2016 will be reported to the plenary. This ensures that everyone hear and learn how each country are building their own community.
This is OSM way/445712235. It was edited twice and has 9 nodes and 2 tags.
way/445712235 was created together with fisherfolks, its local government unit, a social action arm of a university, researchers and diving enthusiasts in Lian, Batangas. It was a culmination of years of grassroots organizing, research and community-based participatory mapping I was part of as a volunteer.
COSCA as the social action arm of the De La Salle University is working with the local fishing community in Kay Reyna (Lian, Batangas) through its community-based resource management program. Part of the community’s aspiration is to establish a community managed marine protected area (MPA) to protect and rehabilitate their marine ecosystem. During the summer of 2012, I was asked by friends to help in mapping Kay Reyna’s community-managed MPA.
My task is “simple”, grab a GPS and mark the location on the boundaries of the proposed MPA.
Update: I was not elected in the previous election. HOT is doing another round this year, to fill-in for the remainder of the term of one borad member who resigned. I’m putting myself forward again. This diary will again serve as my statement.
👋🏾 This is Maning from the Philippines and I’m running for the HOT board election this year. I am a long time OpenStreetMap contributor focusing mostly in building the open mapping community in my country and in Asia.
Over the years, I have been working and living with marginalized sectors such as indigenous peoples, fishefolks, upland farmers and, urban poor communities. In most of these communities, the common struggle is always tied to a place or resource. The understanding of place is a powerful platform that enables conversation between those in the margins and those in power to negotiate and work together. This is the reason I focused my work to using geospatial technology for social justice and conservation. I believe OpenStreetMap and to an extent, HOT as an intermediary is powerful and can effect social change.
I believe my experience with working with marginalized sectors, open data/technology and building online communities in the Philippines can provide a unique perspective to the new challenges of HOT as an organization. However, I recognize that I lack the depth and experience, because I’ve never been a board member of an international organization.
To understand how HOT board operates, I talked to a number of people directly involved in HOT in the last few days. The conversations were insightful and gave me a good perspective on what I should care as a board member. Below is a distillation of these conversations and my personal opinion of what the organization should care about.