Last week Ruben and I took part in a workshop in Cuzco with Mikel and Erika from MapGive / US State Department. This Workshop was part of the Cusco Secondary Cities Project. Mikel led the workshop with a translator and Erika, Ruben and I jumped in with helping people hands on through the exercises.
There were four learning processes involved in the workshop;
- Data collection using OpenMapkit, Fieldpaper and Mapillary
- Adding collected data to OpenStreetMap
- Extracting data from OpenstreetMap
- Using extracted data in Cuscogeonode and Mapbox.com
The workshop took place over the weekend from Saturday 22nd to Sunday 23rd of August. There were 20 attendees, mostly environmental engineers, but also architects and systems engineers. It was a diverse group with ages ranging between 20 and 60 years old. These people are all potentially future mappers. We wanted encourage them to be part of the OSM Community in particular OpenStreetMap Cuzco. We also identified some real world use cases for workshop attendees:
- Mapping of San Jeronimo, Cuzco by a university professor in partnership with his students.
- Environmental engineers mapping villages where they work.
- Using OSM in territorial planning
Staff and attendees
Mikel opened the workshop by talking about the OpenStreetMap community, and their projects around the world. Ruben then followed on by discussing specifically the community in Peru. He invited attendees to join the community and use OSM in their environments.
We demonstrated the benefits of OpenMapKit in the workshop. To properly show the app's advantages we wanted to have lots of existing buildings to add meta data to in a survey. So the Mapbox Ayacucho team did some amazing work tracing buildings a couple of hours on Thursday and Saturday.
Buildings before Mapbox's work
Buildings after Mapbox's work
To use OpenMapKit offline, we added OSM data using overpass-turbo.eu and then saved this to Mikel and Erika's smart phones.
On Saturday afternoon, everybody worked in groups collecting data, groups used a smart phone with OpenMapKit and Mapillary, whilst others collected data using the fieldpapers.
On Sunday morning, we had a training session about editing OpenStreetMap using iD. Ruben and I helped teams to add the data they had collected the day before. Mostly these were points of interest, but also some missing buildings. The training was focused on buildings, with the number of levels and types of construction. And some other objects like banks, stadiums, trees and parks.
The last part of the workshop was aimed at extracting OSM data and using it in other tools, Mikel had to leave for his flight so Ruben led this workshop using Mapzen Metro Extracts, Geofabrik, Geojson.io, overpass-turbo and CuscoGeoNode.
Finally we showed how to use this extracted data to make maps quickly with Mapbox
The Workshop in Cuzco was fruitful, it helped to educate others about the OSM community. We learnt and shared knowledge among those who attended.
The presence of Mapbox was important as much of the workshop was in English but the audience was predominantly Spanish speaking. We were able to explain more accurately than the translator about the mapping techniques we used with the attendees. We also used our experience of OSM to engage attendees and get them excited about the project.