Just last week, Ruben and I supported a workshop in Piura - Perú, lead by Tom Gertin from MapGive/US State departament. This event was promoted by Embassy Lima, MapGive, Piura University and Regional Goverment of Piura.
The presence of Mapbox was important not just because of the predominant Spanish audience, but the number of attendees. We were able to explain accurately the mapping techniques used with the attendees. We also used our experience of JOSM and OSM to engage attendees and get them excited about the project. This Workshop helps to grow the OpenStreetMap Community in Peru as this involve free technology that they can use, and it also permits to attendees knowing about Mapbox advantages. And it's helping build a great and strong relationship that US Department of State and Lima Embassy.
As in Cusco Workshop, we had these learning processes involved in the workshop:
- Data collection using Fieldpaper, Mapillary and OpenMapKit
- Adding collected data to OpenStreetMap with iD
- JOSM training
- Extracting data from OpenStreetMap
- Using extracted data in Mapbox Studio
The workshop was from Wednesday 10th to Friday 12th of February. We had a diverse group, mostly environmental engineers, architects and civil engineers. They work in Piura University, Regional Goverment of Piura and Civil Defense Institute, there were almost 50 attendees. All these institutions are focused in el Nino 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 know attendees. OpenStreetMap was the big theme, and they explored applications and motivations to map Piura. Ruben finalized this session talking about OSM Community in Peru.
There were two days to practice collecting data. On Wednesday evening we prepared all attendees' cellphones by installing Mapillary. They were divided in 8 groups, so they covered diferentes areas in Piura. Mapbox team also created FieldPapers for each group and gave them advice to use FieldPapers and Mapillary. It was great that everybody had applications in their own devices.
Areas to map Piura
On Thursday morning everybody went out to put in practice collecting data. As there were a lot of groups, Ruben and I split our time between 4 groups to help them with their questions.
On Friday morning we still worked in data collection, with OpenMapKit. Each group took a part of Piura University to map whatever they consider necessary. This exercise was half a day.
Collecting data with FieldPapers
When everybody were back at the laboratory on Thursday mid-day, they mapped collected data with iD and uploaded their Mapillary photos. We had a training session about editing OSM with iD. Ruben and I supported each team and we realized they collected a lot of data between buildings, points of interest and missing road names. Also we had a tasking manager project. Attendees selected one box to work in. As Piura is not a good mapped city, there were a lot of information to add into OpenStreetMap.
This part was the busiest part. Ruben lead the JOSM training and I jumped between everybody in the laboratory to help them with the configuration of JOSM, plugins, shortcuts, buildings shapes and conflicts. We tried to help them as much was possible.
Tom taught data extraction 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 Studio.
@mapbox/team-mapbox