Public schools in the Philippines are more than just a place for learning; they also play a secondary role as the de facto community centers, designated precincts during elections, and are essential temporary shelters during emergencies.

The OSM Philippines community aims to validate school locations via the MapRoulette challenge called: “Add schools in the Philippines.”

Of course, there are challenges when managing large-scale MapRoulette challenges. According to Erwin Elario, “The main challenge for this project is getting OSM license-compatible data, and the data clean-up that had to be done before getting it to the tasking manager… With the on-going review, mapping and validation, we are confident that public school data we now have in OSM are better than the official DepEd data, albeit still incomplete.”

OSM Philippines considers this data as foundational. Substantial improvements in geocoding results have resulted from the fixes made from the challenge. There are plenty of tasks left to fix! Check out the MapRoulette challenge to help validate more schools in the Philippines!