The next London evening mapping session & pub is on Wednesday.

Last time we were over in Fleet Street. As it was almost two weeks ago now we've all input our data, and the result looks great. Much less of an ugly gap in building coverage there. That particular patch was actually the centre of the cake for our massive mapping party back in January 2007, based at the MultiMap offices. Since then it was considered to be one the best mapped parts of London for a long time, until we started on the building outlines and super-POI details. Then it became an ugly gap because the buildings are hideously complicated in this area. Old buildings meeting new buildings at funny angles, with narrow allyways and pedestrian tunnels everywhere. Very difficult to see clearly in yahoo, and the building outlines are not particularly easy to map on-the-ground either. This is particularly true of my slice just to West of the pub.

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Before you read any further... Tomorrow night we're mapping around Fleet Street Sign up! sign up!

A couple of weeks ago we had a evening pub meet-up and mapping session in Notting Hill. Matt picked the pub, and gregory drew the cake diagram. So that was great. I got a bit of an organising holiday. If anyone fancies doing either of those things in future, please let me know... or just do it! Other tasks include setting up the wiki information, setting up listings on upcoming.org and other places, and doing a fun little diary entry about it afterwards. But wait! I forgot to do the fun little diary entry! OK here goes...

The weather was rather pleasant, and I'd somewhat cheekily opted to map a slice which was already thoroughly mapped, just because I fancied going to take a look at Holland Park. I'd never been there before. So had a quick peek:

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I've drawn some blobby diagrams to illustrate how we might even out the buildings coverage in central London.

• The red bits show building coverage so far. There's a fair bit, but it's in uneven blotchy patches. When zoomed in, the patchiness looks very ugly.


• The main priority is to fill in the ugly gaps in the city centre, as illustrated by the first pink areas appearing


• After that we might try to round off the area of coverage into a cohesive blob


• After that it would make sense to extend it Northwards to meet with Blumpsy's blob

As if animated gif's weren't evil enough, how about a slideshare presentation? (well at least I didn't try to embed it here) This can be viewed fullscreen and it covers a larger area. Plus you can control it.

So what's the big idea? Well I wrote about London building outlines here and here and again more recently. So I just thought I would draw out my grand master plan

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This time last week we had a big London Hack Weekend kindly hosted by the london hackspace guys, who also spied on us with their webcam and made a time-lapse video.

London Hack Weekend video on Youtube

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It's not only me taking photos of London OSM events. Here's a couple of nice photos from last Saturday's events:

Emilie Laffray giving her Open Knowledge Conference talk

(cc-by-sa-nc Pantera and Mateusz)

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Londoners! A reminder about various London events coming up TOMORROW (Saturday 24th):

• Spacemakers Brixton mini mapping party - Let's get more people along with their laptops. Should be fun.


• Open Knowledge Conference including a little talk on OSM in Haiti.


• Or there's also the Witham mapping party if you fancy a journey out of London

Just had to mention that before I describe last Wednesday's mapping evening and pub meet-up in Holborn, which was quite eventful.

We had along a couple of interesting people (not that I don't find the rest of you interesting you understand) :

Adam Mullineux who works for TfL joined me from the beginning for a mapping demonstration. I was doing my thing of checking building outlines which I'd sketched in from Yahoo the night before. I did a lot of talking and explaining to try and make this rather tedious task more interesting, but talking at the same time as mapping is actually quite difficult.

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(photo - cc-by2 - Paul Miller on flickr)

Tomorrow night it's time for our regular evening mapping then pub event again. It's a volcano special! If you are stranded in london, why not join us? We're always keen to welcome new faces at our pub meet-ups, and it's a great opportunity to learn about the worldwide not-for-profit mapping collaboration known as OpenStreetMap.org

If you know someone who is stranded in London due to volcano ash, send them the link for tomorrow night! http://bit.ly/londonosm3

The weather is looking good, unless you were hoping for some ash-suppressing rainfall. So here we go again. I've done my pre-mapping building sketching for my slice of the cake. Anyone else helping with the spread of the pale maroon patch? No? just me? Well I shall see you in the pub anyway. We don't normally do wetherspoons, but there's an real ale festival on to keep the ale folks happy. There might even be wifi.

We have a busy London Events schedule.

Sat 17th April - Crisis Camp London
Monthly workshop event and meet-up group for technology enthusiasts and other volunteers who get together to work on projects related to disaster relief. They provide wifi and pizza, and we can use it as a place to go and do OSM hacking, but there's also lots of less techy types there who are interesting in learning to contribute to OpenStreetMap (fresh newbies!) So worth getting a few people to go along to this. Jenny and Steve8 are already signed up. I thought this time we could get some people mapping China. Did I mention pizza?.

Wed 21st April - Holborn evening mapping party and pub meet-up
Cake diagram is now available. Sign up! Sign up! Usual fortnightly meet-up, plus I just got off the phone with Stuart Carter, GIS Manager at Southwark Council, who will come along to meet us all at the pub.

Sat 24th April - Open Knowledge Conference 2010
User:Melaskia will be giving a talk about OpenStreetMap Haiti. Thanks to her for taking on that task. Turns out it's only a 15 minute slot. They'll be lots of other interesting topics and people there, so you might like to go along to cheer her on / help answer questions. Or alternatively...

Sat 24th April - Brixton newbies mapping event. Volunteers needed
I see this is as a relatively normal mini mapping party get-together, which I would guess we would have at least five or six people joining in with (and deciding to come at the last minute as usual), BUT it'll only happen if I can get some people to be "the organisers" (just a little bit of commitment to show up 'n' stuff) So if you think you can manage that, please let me know

...more fortnightly meet-ups of course. Plus

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Last week I was wondering around the streets of Soho gawping upwards, paying particular attention to the shapes of the tops of buildings. Photographing them while trying not bump into people, and trying to recognise features I'd seen in the aerial imagery. It's a peculiar fuzzy roof-top world you get to see from above, which can be quite difficult to relate to the street-level view. Anyway this behaviour must've seemed quite odd to my old colleague, when I bumped into him. It was an awkward kind of conversation. He said something like "Wow. Great to see you. I'm on my way somewhere, so can't stop to chat, but... what *are* you doing Harry?" to which the only response is to try to explain OpenStreetMap in 10 seconds flat. Think I did OK.

For the mapping party I think most people opted to skip the mapping and go direct to the pub. Maybe this was because my cake diagram covered an already mapped patch, and my explanation for this came a bit late (and people just aren't convinced by the whole building outlines idea) But I am going to keep organising them around the city centre, because it's only 1 hour's mapping pre-pub at this stage anyway. So c'mon. How about some building outlines?

Clearly the pub is the priority. And quite a pub session it was. Good turn-out.

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It's mapping time tonight! First of the London evening mapping parties for 2010. The weather's glorious. I'm so excited I might pop out at lunchtime and do some mapping just to tide me over until this evening!

I didn't do a very good job of sorting out the details in plenty of time. Sorry out that. Busy busy. If you didn't already see it... CAKE!

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The clocks just went forward. That means I'm up too late (more too late than I am normally) It also means we'll be having more daylight after work from now on, and you know what that means

We had a massively boozed up session last Thursday, or at least it felt that way for me. Maybe I was drinking extra to make up for missing the Tower Hill meet-up. Anyway it was important give the London/Winter 2009-2010 Pub Meetup a good finale. Plus we were celebrating Matt's birthday.

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Well this is embarrassing... (to quote the firefox rescue start-up screen when it fails to rescue anything)

I posted details of my waychains fixup tool, and alongside a red and green graph I commented that there had been very little progress with fixing interstates over the past few months. But it turns out that was bollocks. The actual graph should have looked more like this

Unfortunately I only have two valid data points now, but after a wee correction we're up to 721 paired refs, with the total number of different refs increasing to 1684. Percentagewise that an increase to 42% paired. Progress! Let's see what it looks like: All paired waychains map. Nice!

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My waychains tool has been analysing U.S. interstates for just over a month now. During that time the stats have inched up and down a bit, but mostly held at about 26% paired (currently 290 paired out of 1112 different ref values)

The map showing pairing progress still looks about the same as it did in January:

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I've been very busy spreading myself too thinly again lately. Busy with some work at placr. Busy with lots of other bits 'n' bobs such as wherecamp.eu preparations, wiki Wednesdays presentations, and dealing with s**t (literally)

Things I haven't had much time to think about include scheduling a hack weekend, seeing what mapping can/can't be done in Chile and sorting out the wiki pages accordingly, and other minor little things like doing freelancing work I might one day get paid for.

At the weekend I tricked myself into thinking this was all under control and I could relax a little. What did I do to relax? I went out mapping!

In the sunshine we went and added this wobbly path through Queens wood. That's about as green and wild as mapping gets round here. Plenty more woodland paths to add if anyone else wants to venture into this unexplored jungle.

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We had a London pub meet-up back at the Monkey Puzzle in Paddington on Wednesday.

It was just the usual crew there, and we had plenty to chat about. The obvious topic of the day was reactions to Steve's big push for a front page re-design, which seemed to have wound a few people up on several levels. Personally I only read the blog posts/tweets (steve, TomH, Blackadder, RichardF, Steve again, etc) but from that I can gather that there was a few "lively debates" on the mailing list. So we chatted about all of that, and about how evil Steve is.

We did also get onto actually discussing front page U.I. here's a few snippets of what was said:

-Should the (+) layer picker be expanded by default?

-What layers should be on there? Add lots? need to be scaleable tile services

-Does anyone use the maplint layer? Can be hazardous to new users

-Change (+) to the nice new icon representing layers

-Get rid of the textual description of OSM?

-Increase width of the left column?

-Put a larger search bar at the top? Could be bad for netbooks. Prime screen space

I could try to summarise various high level ideas, but that's been done by various blog posts (e.g. those linked above). Actually I think a good place to do that would be the Front Page Design wiki page (I haven't done so yet. I think it would work well if we move the comment/opinion off that page and state various ideas)

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Tomorrow (Saturday 20th Feb) there's another Crisis Camp London event happening near Russel Square from 10 a.m. till 5p.m. Crisis Camp is a group of technology enthusiasts and other volunteers who get together in London, and other cities worldwide, to work on projects related to disaster relief. Currently very active in relation to Haiti.

There's some details on our wiki. For OpenStreetMap its a good opportunity to have a mini hack day, since the venue has all the ingredients needed. Free wifi and free pizza!

We had a few people along last Saturday, and we set up a table for OpenStreetMap hacking, but we were also advising a handful of other people who were just learning OpenStreetMap and making their first edits (people looking for ways to help in Haiti). This kind of thing will no-doubt happen again tomorrow, so any OpenStreetMappers should feel welcome to come along and help. Not just hackers.

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An important announcement from last nights meet-up. We're having an impromptu little London hack day TOMORROW (Saturday 13th). Apologies for the short notice. If you do want to come along and hack on OpenStreetMap or related tools, or just chat with some people who are doing so, you'd be very welcome to join us. Wifi and pizza provided! I'm going to aim to be there from 10a.m.

That was one of many super-important discussions we had at last Wednesday's London pub meetup.

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11 people signed up for tonight's pub meet-up at the Cheshire Cheese Fleet St on upcoming.org Count 'em! It's all the usual crowd, but I think it's a good idea to get everyone signed up like this. It pushes us up the upcoming rankings.

I always quite liked the tagged-up interlinked flickr photo'ed goodness of upcoming.org, but it has some limitations and I sense it has fallen out of favour a little lately (less activity on the London geeks group) So where do people organise/share event calendars these days? I just listed the event on geekery.in which I believe is a project by someone in the London Ruby gang. Seems a bit rough around the edges, and I'm not liking the big fat postcode-located google maps. Even so... I recommend everyone creates an account on there and add themselves as attendees :-)

We should try to come to more of a decision about hack days / hack weekends. Let's discuss this tonight. Hack weekends seem to be preferred, but...

I had an idea for a sort of mini-hackday. All we need to do is all go along to a Crisis Camp London event one Saturday. If we do some hacking loosely related to one of their projects, then I'm sure we'd be welcome to encamp ourselves at a table there. They need more technical people to attend anyway... and look! There's a "project" called OpenStreetMap - Improving OSM tools (related to crisis mapping), but obviously any improvement to OpenStreetMap site or editing tools could arguably be within that scope. So we can go along and hack on OpenStreetMap with wifi provided and even Pizza!

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A last Wednesday's London pub meet-up we had PIES! The Daniel Gooch in Bayswater seems to be run by a Scottish chap with access to little Scottish pies. We brought along our own Scottish chap who verified the scottishness of the pies. Rather good, and a bargain at £4.50. Other good things about the pub included cashback at the till, cheap soft drinks, and an interesting ceiling. The pub might have lost marks for having a big loud football match on, but we managed to hide down a funny little hole away from the noise. Here's photos of us in our funny little hole:

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I was just trying to make sense of a set of photos and a trace I took last week in Hatton Garden. My NaviGPS claimed to have a lock, but it turns out the trace was all over the place, leaving me to puzzle over where I really was when I took photos of each shop, as well as the usual problem of deciding which side of the road I was pointing the camera at, all made more tricky by the winter low-light conditions. But the most annoying thing about this mapping session... They were all jewellery shops or is that jewelry shops? Either way, they're not that exciting. Anyone got a rendering showing them?

Maybe I should stick to Haiti mapping or catching up on my Brazil mapping. Speaking of which, it's great to see User:deltabrasil has been busy in Salvador. Another big Brazilian city I made a start on while I was on holiday there back in 2007.

Anyway back in wintry London...

Pub meet-up tonight! 7p.m. Bayswater. A few people signed up on upcoming.org (in fact judging by normal sign-up ratios, there'll be loads of us at the pub!) Everyone's welcome