Beautiful Heidelberg

I guess it’s OpenStreetMap’s way of congratulating me on my 5th year as an active contributor when my scholarship application to the HOT Summit and State of the Map both held in Heidelberg, Germany this year was accepted.

I totally over-packed (17 kgs check-in baggage for a week) in anticipation of the cold weather (8 to 18°C) because I’m a tropical girl all the way. But Heidelberg wasn’t cold at all. It was sunny, bright, and the right amount of chill in the morning. The views were gorgeous, too.

Here’s the view from Philosophenweg, a quick but steep hike from Alte Brucke.

Hello from the other side. I also joined the guided old town and castle tour and got this view from the castle as a reward.

Advocacy Mapping

To improve my chances on the scholarship application, I submitted a talk about my advocacy mapping project in the Philippines. I’m a mom to a 4-year old who I breastfed for 2 years through sleepless nights, sheer exhaustion, extreme weight loss, and a few instances of shaming. I chose to map breastfeeding stations to raise awareness not only about the benefits of breastfeeding but also in the hopes that no mother will be shamed for feeding her child, and that she may have safe and accessible spaces to nurse, pump, or ease an engorged breast.

© 2019 Andi Tabinas

Echoing here tidbits of my project:

• Here’s the MapContrib theme where anyone with an OpenStreetMap account can add breastfeeding stations. Just login and click the pencil icon (“Add missing data”) and zoom in as close as possible and put the cross node on the map. The station uses the baby_feeding tag.

• This tiny project challenged me to get out of the norm of unbiased mapping and use the gender lens and my transition to motherhood to examine how I map.

Diversity and Inclusion

I attended a diversity and inclusion session during the State of the Map where our facilitators gathered insights and suggestions from participants about how the annual State of the Map and the larger OpenStreetMap community can be more diverse and inclusive. I had reservations on sharing a lengthy piece due to time constraints during the session and I think writing it here would make a clearer point.

I would like to share about this mapping conference I attended and co-organized in Dumaguete, Philippines last August. Pista ng Mapa (Festival of Maps) shied away from Manila or nearby cities and held the conference in the Visayas region. It provided scholarships to minorities and mappers coming from regional areas. A GeoLadies PH workshop was also held where female participants were encouraged to attend. These items, though, are common practices in local and global mapping conferences.

However, what Pista did differently was hold a women-led plenary session, which meant no other session was running at the same time. A brief scan of the program snippet below would tell you a little thing, that this conference did not hold back in giving space and time to underrepresented sectors, women, in this instance. Those who attended the workshop and plenary session spent half a day in a 3-day conference immersed in different women mappers’ perspectives.

A women-led workshop kicks off after lunch, takes a solid break to recuperate, and gets back on stage for a full plenary session.

If we truly want diversity and inclusion, we need to make time and create the stage for it. There are many ways:

• Make a plenary session about diversity and inclusion.
• Group similarly-themed talks and workshops in parallel so that participants get to attend at least one and not seek other sessions with an entirely different theme.
• Create programs, flyers, announcements, and other materials in such a way that they highlight diversity and inclusion. Providing child care, perhaps? Print that in glittering neon bold.

Fin

How open can OpenStreetMap get?

And since we’re talking about openness, diversity, and inclusion, imagine a doorway large enough to let anyone get through, but plain and uncaring. Now, imagine a morphing doorway. One time, it’s an archway that opens to a vineyard. On other days, it’s a ramp with handrails. Yesterday, it was a swing door for the neighbor’s cat.

I would love the OpenStreetMap community to be this family that is open to all and makes sure everyone is well accounted for and given space to thrive and belong, including the cat, and in Heidelberg, the monkey.

This is Jen, your friendly neighborhood Asian woman mapper, signing off. © 2019 Feye Andal