News — 25 September, 2020

Philippines Completes Remote Mapping and Validation for Pampanga

On September 21, 2020, the Philippine mapping team finished remote mapping and validation for the whole of Pampanga.

At 1:21 p.m. on September 21, our Technical and GIS Specialist, Feye Andal, reported the completion of all remote mapping and validation tasks for Pampanga, a pilot area for the PhilAWARE project. Here is a visual of the project’s progress (building footprints and roads mapped) from January to September 2020:

It must be noted that prior to HOT Philippines’ activities in the area, members of the local DRRM community and OSM Philippines have contributed in mapping Pampanga. In the before-and-after maps below (published on August 8 for #OpenStreetMap16), you can see that some municipalities such as Guagua were already well-mapped in the “before” images.

Field Mapping and Training

The HOT team members based in Pampanga started field mapping on August 19. Despite challenges to movement and schedules due to specialized lockdowns for Covid-19, the team has been able to proceed with their tasks carefully with permission from the local government units in Pampanga. They are currently working on mapping their fourth scheduled municipality.

Simultaneously, other members of the team have been coordinating with members of and volunteers from the local government units in Pampanga for OSM trainings. You can find culture trivia and regular documentation of HOT Philippines’ field mapping and training activities on our Instagram, @hotosm_ph, in the “Field: Pampanga” highlight.

Partnerships and Speaking Engagements

Aside from fieldwork, members of our team also actively participated in partnerships and events as speakers and panelists:

• Bry Damasco, our Country Manager, was a speaker during the launch of MapaKalamidad.ph, and was a panelist at NSCM Online’s Citizen Science Webinar

• Sen Roxas, our Training Manager, was a speaker for the fifth session of @ScoutinginAPR’s Webinar Series for SDGs

• Feye Andal, our Technical and GIS Specialist, was a speaker for MapBek’s JOSM Training

Commitment to Telling Our Narrative

This month was also a time for the whole of HOT to reflect and reassess the way our stories are told. In the global scale, HOT Philippines is participating in the creation of a Comms Guidance Document to share with corporate partners who plan to feature HOT work in the future. The aim is to uphold the dignity and properly tell the stories of the communities we work with and live in.

We are also continuously collecting stories for #MAPAsinoKaMan—a campaign that we started last month.

It is at this point that we would like to thank those who have submitted their stories so far. We are taking the time to scrutinize the way we layout and copyedit submissions to ensure that everyone’s contributions are told the way they should be told.