The workshop: Orientation and Consultation on Geographic Information System (GIS) and its Applicability to Social Welfare and Development of the DSWD GIS Unit was conducted on July 18-20, 2018 in Quezon City. It was attended by the Planning Officers and Technical Staff from the Central Office, Field Offices and Attached Agencies of the Department.

The program consisted of several talks from various resource speakers of different sectors (academe, social/community development, environment, Indigenous Peoples, disaster response, and private sector).

Being one of the main sources of free spatial data, OpenStreetMap was briefly presented by OSM mapper advocate, Ms. Jen Ayco (https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/jenjereren). She encouraged the participants to sign up for an account to increase visibility of each of their communities, and raise diversity (gender, ethnicity, PWD’s) on the map. Surprisingly, few participants were already mapping volunteers of OSM! :)

During the afternoon break, I found myself surrounded with the three women mappers/resource speakers we invited. They’ve shared experiences in the field of GIS and discussed the importance of an integrated and free geographic data source in the country. There is an existing one though, PhilGIS.org, but still needs to be populated and updated.

Ms. Kail’s remark on this topic was something to ponder about: “No one owns spatial data. Nobody can have copyrights on your location.”

Maybe the act of gathering location information (purchasing of tools and investing effort) gives data collectors the right to own it. Giving proper credits to data collectors would facilitate sharing of data. And there are still privacy issues. It’s still a case to case basis. And maybe, spatial data can be also be tagged as “special” data depending on its purpose.

On the last day of activity, we asked participants to identify data which can be translated spatially. Data were classified as data for internal use or data for sharing. It’s great to know that they’ve appreciated how GIS can be applied to their work. Not only for mapping/visualzation purposes, but also for planning purposes such as attending to the needs of vulnerable sectors in times of disaster by building inclusive evaculation centers and other gaps on social facilities.

Indeed, transforming their special data to spatial data to communicate and serve the peolple better.