This morning was our first (ever?!) OpenStreetMap meetup in Perth, Western Australia. Six of us turned up at the Goods Shed cafe (near the railway station) for introductions, coffee, and a general figuring-out of a plan. Then we headed off in small groups around the local area, mapping footpaths, shops, businesses, trees, drinking fountains, and everything else we could find.

There was lots missing from the map, and we didn’t get to add quite everything… but we did pretty good I think! It’s always hard to add urban areas like this, especially with things like house numbers (which never seem very well advertised on shop-fronts). We divided up into ‘themes’, so that we didn’t clobber each other’s edits (some did shops, some footpaths, some trees, etc.), and that worked really well. Things that didn’t work as good: most of us weren’t so sure about mapping on iOS; the heat was verging on too much (~35°C); and the ground we were covering wasn’t good for demonstrating other types of mapping (such as relations for longer named walking routes).

After a few hours mapping, we reconvened for lunch at Typica. Hopefully the next event will be in a month or so, and perhaps we’ll look at doing something online so we can all share other skills about desktop editing.

If anyone’s interested in joining in, we’re mainly communicating on the Geogeeks Slack channel.