It’s summer in the Philippines, and even at 08h, the sun’s already ablaze, and a friend with an umbrella is always welcome sight.

Our Tuesday morning in Tagbilaran started with a field mapping exercise with volunteers from the University of Bohol YouthMappers Club, gathering by the bandstand in Plaza Rizal for last minute rejoinders.

And so we got ready to head out to our assigned areas, to write down observations, sketching on FieldPapers, for fresh geodata we could use to update the neighborhood map. It’s also a practical exercise for the Geodetic Engineering students who participated, but not before a group photo, while everyone is still fresh-looking.

We also collected street-level imagery, which we also plan to use for a workshop. Panoramax , of course, was used for the initial batch of photos, because we want to use them immediately, a workshop right after the field work, but we plan to upload the collected images on Mapillary, as well.

We’ve had no issues using OpenCamera for capturing imagey , since almost everyone was using Android. We’d have recommended SkyFlow for iOS, but the outlier was a device with HarmonyOS, which uses “PetalMaps”, apparently a map service from Tomtom, but doesn’t appear to use any OSM data, nor Google Maps.

After a 90-minute dose of sunshine, we trotted back to the campus for the MapaTime workshop, a respite from the heat and then some hands-on mapping.

Each of the volunteers assigned to an area is given a theme to focus on, though they’re free to collect and take note of anything they find interesting:

• Emergency/Lifeline features
• Shops and Commercial Establishments
• Mobility and Public Transport

The heat map below visually summarizes the editing efforts made by local community of mappers in Tagbilaran, hosted by the University of Bohol YouthMappers club.

Their club is planning to run an initiative to improve the neighborhood map around their campus soon, and hope that the tools and techniques they picked-up from the workshop can be applied for that project.

Finally, a last group-fie with their college dean, and their “UB pose” – a perfect way to hide my double-chin! 😆