Last Saturday, February 20, Maning, Rally, and I went to FEATI University to give a workshop about OpenStreetMap to the Students’ Association of Geodetic Engineering (SAGE). We were invited by Sorbi, a Geodetic Engineering student of the said university and an admirer of the OpenStreetMap project. He thought that presenting OSM to his fellow students and orgmates would provide an interesting counterpoint to all the geodetic engineering lessons they are studying.

In the morning, Maning gave the students a presentation about OpenStreetMap in general and OpenStreetMap in the Philippines in particular, not unlike the presentation given to the BMW Car Club last year. I demonstrated Potlatch while Rally showed off his expertise in using Garmin GPS units (and rambling about how the dire lack of data in depressed areas brought him to OSM) .

After lunch, we divided the students into three groups and set them out with GPS units (most provided through the help of Sorbi) into the streets of Quiapo, Sta. Cruz., and Binondo to do some mapping fieldwork. This activity should suitably provide them with a real hands-on experience of doing casual mapping and not just geodetic surveying.

After the fieldwork, we regrouped and had some of the students do some actual map editing with their collected data and GPS traces via Potlatch, the online OSM editor. You can see some of their contributions on this map. One thing I realized is that OSM’s POI ontology needs some serious work! But the free-for-all tagging scheme lets people tag things however they want and the wiki nature of the project will just bring everything into line.

Although I’m quite sure that not all of the students who attended would end up being active contributors to OpenStreetMap, I do hope that we get a few new enthusiastic OpenStreetMappers to help build the most complete, free, and open map of the Philippines.

Do you want us to give you or your group a presentation about OpenStreetMap? We’d love to do it and just give a shout-out in the comments.

More pictures from the workshop can be found over at Flickr.