Last week, Ruben and I helped lead an OpenStreetMap workshop in Piura - Perú, set up by Tom Gertin from MapGive/US State departament. This event was promoted by Embassy Lima, MapGive, Piura University and Regional Goverment of Piura.
As the local Spanish speaking OpenStreetMap experts we walked attendees through mapping techniques and got them excited about the project. The workshop helps to grow the OpenStreetMap community in Peru, introduces attendees to Mapbox and helps build our relationship with the US Department of State and the Lima Embassy around OpenStreetMap and MapGive.
Building on our experience with the Cusco Workshop, we covered these topics:
- Data collection using Fieldpapers, Mapillary and OpenMapKit
- Adding collected data to OpenStreetMap with iD
- JOSM training
- Extracting data from OpenStreetMap
- Using extracted data in Mapbox Studio
The workshop took place from Wednesday 10th to Friday 12th of February. We had a diverse group of attendees - almost 50 in total. They were mostly environmental engineers, architects and civil engineers. They work at Piura University, the Regional Government of Piura and the Civil Defense Institute. All these institutions are focused on the el Niño phenomenon, as this causes destruction in several parts of Piura and Peru. So, we found potentially future mappers, that actually are part of the OSM Community as OpenStreetMap Piura.
Staff and attendees of the Workshop
Tom started with a funny round of questions, to involve and get to know attendees. OpenStreetMap was the big theme, and they explored applications and motivations to map Piura. Ruben finalized this session talking about the OSM community in Peru.
There were two days allocated to collecting data. On Wednesday evening we prepared all attendees' cellphones by installing Mapillary. They were divided in 8 groups and covered different areas in Piura. We also created FieldPapers for each group.
Areas to map in Piura
On Thursday morning everybody went out to practice collecting data. Ruben and I split our time between 4 groups to help them with their questions.
On Friday morning we wrapped up data collection, exploring OpenMapKit. Each group took a part of Piura University to map whatever they considered important.
Collecting data with FieldPapers
With everybody back at the lab on Thursday mid-day, we mapped collected data with iD and uploaded Mapillary photos. Ruben and I supported each team and we realized they collected a lot of data: buildings, points of interest and missing road names. We set up a tasking manager project and attendees split up work by boxes. Piura is not a very well mapped city, so there was a lot of work to do.
Finally, Ruben lead the JOSM training and I jumped between everybody in the laboratory to help them with the configuration of JOSM, plugins, shortcuts, building shapes and conflicts.
Tom taught data extraction using Mapzen Metro Extracts, Geofabrik, Geojson.io, overpass-turbo and CuscoGeoNode.
Finally Ruben and I showed how to use this extracted data to make maps quickly with Mapbox Studio.
@mapbox/team-mapbox