What an evening!

60+ willing volunteers with laptops in a room (Big thanks to Skills Matter) with a team of helpers & great things happened. We talked, they worked & occasionaly we answered questions or helped in some other way. Some of our team were elsewhere in the world giving feedback to our new mappers, and some more were learning & helping using web links. There are quite a few photographs on Facebook - search for Missing Maps Project.

Progress?

Well, I’ve never seen anything so good so quickly. Our mappers coped with the squares magnificently, checking what had already been done, adding missing details, and marking the squares as complete. Validators checked the squares, corrected any slight errors, gave feedback (messaging system in the TM works extremely well for this) & marked the squares as validated - we do need more validators though - might have to see if we can train some of our more regular volunteers in this.

Our Team

You were terrific. They wouldn’t have done it without you - the whole package is needed & I don’t know the names to thank everyone. There will be many unsung hero’s and you should have a warm glow inside from knowing that you helped to make it work. Advertising, contacts, paperwork, ordering pizzas, standing at the door, making the technical bits work, admin - more admin. There’s a lot of work needed, and I for one am grateful that you helped to make it happen, On the night I was really pleased to see many helpers giving advice - Dan, Harry, Nataly, Ralph, Richard, to name just some who willingly gave their time & expertise.

& Now

## Validating / Feedback - to come I’ll try to make sure that everyone who was at the session gets feedback on at least one of the squares they compete - it may take me a while though. Don’t wait for the feedback, keep mapping & keep learning. Mistakes happen, when you find out you’ve been making one, see if you can go back over the squares you’ve already completed & correct your previous work. If the square has been validated, the validator has probably already corrected any small errors. Personally I spend part of my time researching & part of my time mapping - have a read through http://learnosm.org/en/ or any of the links from osm.wiki/Main_Page

I’d recommend that you sign up for HOT emails - this link for a howto: https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/hot

If IRC is your thing then osm.wiki/Irc (obviously I’d recommend the HOT group!)

More to come

Mapping - there is plenty of scope - the Task Manager contains many worthwhile tasks / projects. We trained mainly in iD, but there are other map editing programmes and future mapathons will cover options. If this was your first mapathon you only saw the tip of the ice berg - there are other HOT volunteers adding names to villages & towns (have to be careful of the source, so there are special instructions on this), mappers who validate, and volunteers who write software - boredom is not an option!

Thanks for reading, and I hope to see more of you with HOT and the Missing Maps Project - let’s get it mapped before the disaster happens!