I'm a keen fiddler with the OSM wiki. It's almost become my "role" within the project. Certainly it's the area where I've made myself most useful. Over time this has given me a bit of a birds-eye view of project goings-on. But it's a slightly skewed view because actually, active though it is, the wiki is not the primary communication channel of OSM. That would be the dreaded mailing list (dev and talk)

I don't follow the mailing list at all. Gave up trying. It's too high traffic. If I want high traffic, I look at Recent Changes. I should probably call in on nabble every now and then, just to look for interesting subjects. But I kind of decided that however you slice it, the mailing list will be too much of drain on my time. But this means that I (and people like me) end up missing out on any of the juicy announcements, which don't surface so quickly via other channels.

Which is why OSM community really badly needs a mailing list weekly digest again! I have just put forward this suggestion via a wiki edit (of course!). I suppose posting to the mailing list would be more sensible... but I'm not on the mailing list :-)

I was boring my cousin with talk of OpenStreetMap as I went to visit her in Plymouth again last weekend. It does kind of come up in conversation when you're sat in the passenger seat taking hundreds of uninteresting photos out of the car window.

I wasn't actually planning to go into the city itself. We ended up spending some time walking around "the Hoe" (grassy peninsula parkland place with views out to sea) and "the Barbican" old town around the harbour. These are pretty much the main tourist areas to visit in Plymouth (here), so while I there, I was thinking there was a good chance that this was all on the map already.

But it turns out not. I took a look last night, and saw the whole area in nice clear Yahoo imagery coverage, but very little mapping progress. I couldn't resist settling down for a hour or so of sketching in parks and road layouts. It seems like time well spent, because now we at least have more of the tourist areas of this city roughly in place, ready for somebody local or a visiting tourist to go survey properly.

I haven't done yahoo sketching for a while. The tag highway=road got voted in, which seems to have some baring on how we are supposed to go about doing it, but to my mind it's a clumsy solution, since it involves adding this tag everywhere, and then removing and replacing again later. Too many key presses. Sketching should be quick. But at least this, along with things like the OSM fieldwork have pointed a spotlight on the potential of yahoo sketching.

But I think if it was made more clear that we are allowed/encouraged to do yahoo sketching, then we wouldn't have any yahoo covered cities which are still missing their major tourist centres.

I was up in Aberdeen for a friend's wedding this weekend. I should've dedicated more time to eating a hearty breakfast, making sure my shirt was properly ironed, and also just chilling out in preparation for a long night of ceilidh dancing...

...but with all those unnamed streets, I couldn't resist a morning mapping expedition.

Data from that, and data from the Borough (but actually Bermondsey) mapping evening to be input some time soon.

Here's a funny story.

Some chaps came over to our London office from the Czech republic, and after I'd spent the day giving them a training course, they asked me some questions about how to get to Big Ben and Tower Bridge etc. Naturally I pulled up an online map on the projector screen, and naturally it was openstreetmap.org . Openstreetmap has been better than google maps in central London for a long time now. They were impressed by the detail. Even their hotel showed up on the map, so they started asking me questions about it.

Part of me was thinking "No. please don't get me started. I'm supposed to be enthusiastic about our company products, not OSM!" So I casually described the project, and tempered their enthusiasm (and mine) by pointing out that London is an extreme case. The coverage isn't that detailed everywhere. For example let's take a look at the city where they are from: Olomouc ...oh wow ...OK

Maybe OSM coverage really is expanding at an increasing rate.

http://www.opengeodata.org/?p=309

Last night I sorted out my photos from the 4th Anniversary party, and stuck them on the wiki. All good fun, but I fear the japanese have out-done us

Just finished inputting my Canning Town data. I was mapping an area to the south of the docks. Quite a large meet-up, which was fun. Nice sunset drinks by the docks and then thai meal. And birthday celebrations for Mark too.

Up next...

The OpenStreetMap 4th Anniversary Birthday party kicks off in 1 hours time! Pub by the Thames. Should be good. I might nip into borough market for some kind of poncey organic burger on the way.

We're going to canning town tonight. Quite a lot of people have signed up for this, so should be a good one. Anyone else fancy coming along?

We don't know the name of the pub we're going to yet, which is all very mysterious (just know where it is). I imagine it will be a pleasant place by the docks. But then again they'll be a planes landing over head.

Hopefully I'll have to time to pop over to the riverfront and take a look at the Thames barrier. Never seen it close up.

I completed the OSM fieldwork pledge. Forked out a tenner and also spent an hour staring at the luscious Grenadan jungle.

It took about half an hour to spot anything which hadn't already been traced. Found a few little tracks through jungle eventually, but all the obvious roads have been sketched in, so I'd say we have Grenada pretty much "Phase one complete".

This wasn't very satisfying, so I had a quick look at some other island, picked at random. "Norman Island" seems to be largely uninhabited. A loop of jungle tracks to add ...but what's this white thing on top of the hill? (see yahoo imagery in potlatch) Do we have a tag for a UFO landing site?

The new arsenal football ground Emirates Stadium feels like it is practically on my doorstep. It isn't. But it feels like it is because it's so frickin' big. I'd always meant to wander over there and take a closer look, but so far hadn't quite found the occasion to do so. Until...

I realised that it wasn't on the map! A whole ginormous stadium... Missing! It isn't showing up on Yahoo imagery, because it's too new. So I guess nobody's done any real surveying work in the area, until I got up early this morning, left my girlfriend at the gym while I went on brisk walk around the area. Bagged a whole load of unnamed streets, and a sixty-thousand seater stadium. Not bad for a quick morning stroll!

I wasn't able to get a GPS trace around the base of the building because it was fenced off (and generally deserted), so I've just had a guess at the building's outline (oval shape) based on rough photo views and a cheeky glance at a map on a stadium signpost.

I had a great time at State of the Map conference. Met lots of people. Lots of presentations and conversations which were thought provoking and educational. I also learned that if you drink too much guiness your poo goes very dark.

I've barely recovered from that, and already it's time for another meet-up. Tonight we're doing a Stratford Mapping Evening. That's revisiting the same area we were at on June 4th. On that old event page, I've put some "before and after" maps, and some visualisations using itoworld.com (very easy on-the-fly generated images which Peterito gave a talk on).

If you're in London, Stratford's easy to get to. Come along tonight!

Just took a bus up Caledonia Road on the way home. I had been peering at some suspicious looking bits of the Yahoo imagery, which looked like streets but weren't traced at all. Sure enough, they are right there in this quite central location, and easily visible from the 91 bus route, and not on the map yet! So that's a reminder to me, that eliminating all the unnamed streets is not the be all and end all. There's still important refinements to make closer to the centre of London.

Seem to be gathering data faster than I can input it at the moment. I've just had a late night editing session to try to catch up. Yesterday's Herne Hill data, and some older Rotherhithe data (our London mapping evenings)

Still to do: some other obscure bits of London mapping plus my holiday mapping.

I'm back from a week long holiday in the Alps doing some whitewater kayaking. I did also do a little bit of whitewater mapping.

I have a few messages about the OSM MediaWiki extension, plus a full wiki watchlist to work through. Bear with me.

A good time was had at the Bermondsey meet-up last night. Cloudmade were there in force. Next mini mapping evening will be back at the Isle of Dogs next Wednesday, but I wont be able to make it unfortunately. I'm going to be whitewater kayaking in the Alps next week. I'll try to develop the whitewater maps! Trouble is my NaviGPS has a log file problem which isn't normally a problem, but rather limits my holiday capacity. Ah well. I should probably be concentrating on not drowning myself!

Next wednesday we're meeting to map South Bermondsey (South East area of London)

...but before that I'm about to head over to a London Wikipedia meet-up right now. I will probably talk about openstreetmap again with those guys, although I think they're getting sick of hearing about it!

The Stratford mapping evening was fun.

I wondered down the west side of the cake, and tried to get some more photos to help figure out where the Olympic building site goes up to (further north than we currently have it)

And as I've just written on that wiki page....

When we converged on the pub, there were more people than expected! The areas we managed to cover were strangley sporadic patches in the North, and the South, and less in the middle, so we'll see how that looks in a week or so, once we've all keyed our data in.

There is a lot of unnamed residential streets in this direction, and Stratford is well connected, so it might be a good to revisit with another mapping party.

I'm going to be getting together some information and images to be published in a little Stratford newspaper Any ideas/images? contact me

This evening we're mapping Stratford, East London (Come along!)

Not many people signed up for this. I thought listing on upcoming.org would be a good way to get the message out to a certain demographic. And I added a newbies description on the wiki page there (which we can reuse) But I didn't think much beyond that.

But today I got an email from someone who had heard about the event through a friend of mine
"I am currently working on an art project which will culminate in a series of newspapers called the Stratford Grapevine to be distributed from Stratford station during 2008 ....I was wondering if you would like to contribute something about it for the newspaper? Some photos taken on the night, and maybe a report on what you're doing and how it's gone? It sounds like it could be a really interesting addition for the paper" - Lucy Harrison

So that looks like an interesting but slightly bizarre promotions opportunity after the event.

But this word-of-mouth effect got me thinking more about promotion. There's bazillions of local Stratford youth/culture/community/development organisations who we should really have sent messages to, to tell them about the event a few weeks beforehand.

Obviously it takes a special kind of person to be interested in wandering around gathering street names on an evening, so it can be a hard sell, but if enough little messageboards and event listings include a link to us, maybe we can get the message out to a few people who might come along.

The Brixton Mapping Evening was good fun. Unfortunately my camera batteries were dead (forgot to recharge after my long mapping session at the weekend) so I had to revert to old paper methods. This was a reminder of how much quicker photo mapping is compared with writing down street names.

My slice of the cake was also quite awkward in terms of pedestrian navigability. Funny dead-end layouts of fences, gates, and buildings meant I had double back on myself many times, in situations where I would normally expect some short-cuts. This got me pondering how we can represent such restrictions on a map. Pedestrian routing. hmmm. I think we're long way off, but maybe one day.

Good pub session afterwards too. Met a guy called Steve who demonstrated a mobile app he's been working on. Shows OSM maps, and allows map annotation. Apparently you can download an earlier version at trackmyjourney.co.uk. ...and another guy Alex who is lawyer, or at least worked with law in some sense. Would be good if we can persuade him to get more involved.

The next mini London mapping evening is in Stratford.

This weekend I got a couple of traces + photos while my brother drove in and around Plymouth. He wasn't slowing down to let me get good photos though, so I shall have spend a few hours squinting at blurry street sign pictures tonight. I'll probably be able to add a peculiar random scattering of streets to the map.

Went to London Hack Day last Saturday. Twas good. Hacked a bit on MediaWiki extensions.

I have a new profile mugshot photo (Steve's hacking), but where does it show up? On a diary post?