This week, Ian and I are in the Philippines working alongside the World Bank to set up collaborative, open source tools for government to track critical infrastructure, particularly road data.

Good road data is crucial for smart development and disaster response. To help the national and local governments manage their road infrastructure, we’ll be building on open tools such as iD, the popular editor for OpenStreetMap. Our goal is to use open-source tools to create better data infrastructure, at an enterprise level, tailored to the information needs of government.

We are confessed fans of OpenStreetMap and the ecosystem that surround it. These tools are battle-tested and optimized for the quantity of data that flows daily through OSM. We think these tools can make government work better, and so far we’ve seen terrific responses from officials here.

We’ll be in the Philippines until next Tuesday. Ping us on Twitter if you’d like to meet and talk OSM and managing infrastructure data.