My Pista ng Mapa 2019 Experience

I don’t know where to start in my Pista ng Mapa 2019 experience because everything was amazing and unforgettable, but I’ll start from the very beginning of my journey.

I was invited to Pista ng Mapa 2019 by my mentor. At that time, we just finished our CWTS++ session from our school. Us volunteers and with my mentor were just having our lunch and discussion from the session. At the end of the discussion, he mentioned to us that we should apply a scholarship for Pista ng Mapa 2019. I was interested about the conference and the experience that I will be gaining. As I got home, I applied for a scholarship to Pista ng Mapa 2019. (Spoiler Alert) At that moment, I didn’t know that my application will be accepted. Days went passed by, and shortly I received an email. But at that time I didn’t check on my email, so I wasn’t notified. A day after the email was sent, I was notified by my peer that we were both shortlisted in the scholarship. I was shocked and hoping to get the scholarship. Fast forward through time and I was in tears of joy because I was accepted.

2 weeks before the conference, I was nervous and excited at the same time. As I prepare myself for the conference, I practiced my public speaking skills and I prepared my knowledge to be shared in Dumaguete.

Days went passed by and fast forward to my first flight experience. I consider this experience as one of the memorable, because it is a starting point for my adulthood experience. As I arrived in the airport, it is time for me and my peer to travel through air for the first time. Fast forward to Dumaguete, landing was bumpy and finally we have landed safely.

Now here’s another memorable experience, when we were going to our accommodation. Long story short, we got lost but we found the location safely like after 30 minutes of finding it with some help online. I’ll consider it as a part of my being a mapper experience.

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Here I am at the last day of our Internship. From the first day to the last day, I gained a lot of knowledge from the Geo-mapping field. Our training help me gain more interest in the field. I am happy to say that it was worth taking this Internship because it allowed me to deepen my skills in editing, it made me more confident on every task I do, and It made me productive.

I would consider the program as continuing chapter in my field of interest. It added more choices or opportunities in my pathway. From combining what I learned in this program and on what I will be learning in the future, it creates a great combination of knowledge on what I’ll be doing for the better good in the future.

This isn’t the end, I am looking forward to use and continue my training in the upcoming days, months, or years. Whats important is that I stay in that pathway of knowledge and extend my learning towards to others.

I am looking forward for more opportunities in the future. Thank you for this wonderful and grateful opportunity.

Here we are enjoying our stipend (Im in the left side)

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After the third week of Kaart’s internship here in the Philippines, I can say that I am getting more consistent on every task I do. I even organized my workflow properly, so that I can finish my work faster. Also I recheck and validate my edits before I upload many times on each tasks, which in that case it lessen the small errors. I can definitely say I improved better than last week workflow.

I would say the whole week is based on reflecting on our errors. Each corrected or fixed error help us lessen the error that we miss or created. It leads us to improve ourselves better and to lessen it. Thinking about errors, I missed a lot of small and big flaws but it sure helped me to look after those.

At the end of the week, we had a workshop which is about Leaflet. Leaflet is a widely used open source JavaScript library used to build web mapping applications. Since I have a small background in HTML, It helped me understand it. At the end of the workshop, we did a exercise of locating our school and adding details like a marker point and highlight box.

Heres a picture of combining what I’ve learned in MapBox and Leaflet.

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After the second week of Kaart’s internship, I gained more experience and knowledge in geo-mapping. My JOSM skills is improving, I tend to use more shortcuts which let me finish my task faster. Aside from my JOSM skills, my experience extended more on each tasks I do and upload.

This week is more on consistent work which is applying our first week of training. I made my work accurate and detailed, in this way my data represented is clean and exact. The whole week I kept correcting my small mistakes which lessened it in my work. So far I am focusing on less errors, steady workflow and uploading accurate data.

Also in this week, we had a small workshop which is about MapBox. We created our own map with our own designed style. I learned something new again and I hope could use it in the future.

I am looking forward for the third week. Again thank you for this opportunity.

After the first week of Kaart’s internship, the 2 terms in CWTS++ (CWTS++ project pilot is a service-learning program spear-headed by the MapAm❤re Initiative) here in PUP San Juan has finally helped me to apply my skills and knowledge in this internship. My knowledge in Mapping (OpenStreetMap) have went into a new level of being a professional.

Within the first week of Kaart’s internship I have experienced 2 days of training, which I was trained to be accurate in every upload. After the training, my JOSM knowledge, my logical mapping knowledge, and my accuracy sharpened. On every task that I do, I felt confident on every adjustment I make .This internship have started superbly and I am looking to forward on the next upcoming days. Everyday I gain more and more experience and that what makes me to to be accurate, consistent and fast on every task. With that said I felt accomplished and great in the first week of Kaart’s internship. I am grateful for this opportunity.

At last, I am finishing mapping the 50.0 m satellite imagery of my neighborhood. It took around 2000 nodes plus on my total edit. To be honest, it was difficult to map my neighborhood. Because of the dense and subdivision area that I live in, in short, too many houses. Another difficult thing is the imagery. I’ve used two imagery which was Bing and DigitalGlobal Standard imagery. I’ve kept on adjusting the imagery offset because of the misalignment of Bing to DigitalGlobal Standard imagery. After mapping and adjusting the imagery, I move on to naming variety stores or “Sari-sari store” in Tagalog and other important buildings. In the end, it felt good even when there was some obstacles in mapping my neighbourhood.

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Mapping my own neighborhood is fun because this is place where I grew up. Its was easy to recognize houses, stores, and other buildings because this is my neighborhood. But as I opened OSM to look for my neighborhood, I was shocked to see that almost half of the 0-100 meters is not yet mapped. My whole neighborhood are basically full of houses because I live in a subdivision. So that is the reason why half of map are empty.

Now its a challenge for me because I need to finish mapping the whole area of emptiness. As I started mapping my field paper outside, things went funny while looking for details. I’ve encountered this old lady who told me “What are you doing young man?”. I’ve said “I am mapping and getting details for field paper that I’m working on.”. She said “What field paper?”. I’ve said “Field paper is an assignment for us students in CWTS, this will help update the map online so that people could navigate and see the location they want to easily.”. The old lady said “Online?? Internet?? Internet makes us addicted to it and it could make tutorials of bombs or destroy the world!!”. I was confused because I only wanted to finish my field paper and this old lady came up to me saying Internet is going to kill us all. But I have no time for destruction for the world so I left the old lady hanging in the air. I’ve continued working on my field paper and after 1 hour of roaming around my neighborhood I came home to rest and finish my field paper on the next days.

Its was a fun experience. 10/11 would repeat again.