Ho, Ho, Ho

Antlers, what a good idea. If you want to break the ice & chat with a bunch of nice people, try wearing antlers. I hope I haven’t given too many people my cold - honestly, it’s just been a little nuisance until yesterday when I nearly lost my voice.

I’m certain that the Missing Maps Team deserve a brilliant Christmas for all the hard work they put in making these events run so smoothly - It’s a pleasure to work with you guys & Thank You. I’m including all the HOT people who turned up to help - brilliant, you’re advice (and waiter service delivering mince pies) is invaluable.

Great progress folks - I can’t wait to see the full stats when you’ve all finished any squares you were working on, but 34% done during the course of one evening, and many more squares started & just needing a little more work - that’s impressive!

I’d like to see all of you at future mapathons, it’s always amazing how quickly people progress - if you’d like a little light reading, have a read of LearnOSM section for Remote, Armchair or Mapathon mappers which aims to helping you with everything you will need to map remotely for these tasks. Personally I find it displays quite well on my phone.

LearnOSM is something I’ve become deeply involved in now - it’s the ‘HowTo’ for many things that the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team - HOT promote, so it includes many sections on how to map, how to use JOSM & iD, and for NGO’s how to extract & use the data that OSM produces. It’s worth spending time delving around in there - there’s so much information that no index is ever going to do it justice - you just need to spend a little time delving around.

A little help please.

• It would be really great if you could finish the squares you started on - it’s much easier for you because you know what you did, and what’s still to be done.
• If any of you have got photo’s of buildings, huts, roads & any of the other structures that we are mapping in Africa, and you can release them to HOT with no copyright restrictions so I can add them into LearnOSM it would be very helpful - a picture says a thousand words.
• Translation of LearnOSM - always welcome if you fancy having a go. Links are off of the site (click on the pencil). It’s amazing how many people all over the world want to help, and if we can give them the information in a language they can understand it makes a big difference.

Have a Happy Christmas & a Terrific New Year,

and I hope to see you all again in the future at another event.

Nick - the Tallguy with antlers, bald head & a cold!