OpenStreetMap
Last of the London winter pub meet-ups
Posted by Harry Wood on 28 March 2010 in English. Last updated on 29 March 2010.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.
As a birthday present, I think I might have managed to offload responsibility for Hack Weekend early 2010 onto him. That's what we agreed right Matt? :-) We talked about doing it April 24th/25th, which is a date I can't actually make myself, but looks reasonable for other people.
We had the usual gang, plus an appearance from SK53, and two new faces. This is great. How can we get more new people coming along? I'm going to look into arranging a mapping event in conjunction with Southwark Council at some point during the summer. That kind of thing will hopefully reach new people. Update: I notice Tom Chance has blogged more about this.
Our little London mapping team seems to do OK though. In fact we're going to be hard-pressed to find enough interesting mapping challenges within week-day evening range this summer. I was already running out of ideas for unmapped areas by the end of the last marathon. And look! The London map is good enough for printed books!
Discussion
Comment from amm on 28 March 2010 at 09:09
Indeed, it will be hard to find an area that is sufficiently unmapped. But I think there is more than enough that still needs doing. So I suggest to change the format a bit. Rather than map some specific area around the pub, I would suggest we'd each map some specific aspect on our way to the pub.
For example check and close all the OpenStreetBugs on your way, or add traffic restrictions like maxspeed, turnrestrictions, maxweight, ... on your way. Another one could be to take the bus to the pub and map the corresponding bus route. And if we have really run out of things, there are always housenumbers. Again, if we do it housenumbers along the (major A roads) way, rather than in some area, it might be easier to motivate people.
Comment from Harry Wood on 29 March 2010 at 10:24
The difficulty is choosing targets to go for based only on yahoo imagery plus the data we have so far. London OpenStreetBugs could give us some targets. Maybe I'll pick a pub near a cluster of those, but there aren't actually that many bugs.
I had a few thoughts about POI gathering while I was on the bus yesterday. TimSC's somehow filled in a bunch of landuse data include commercial areas e.g.. I don't know what he's basing that on, and I can see he's missing a pink area by Belsize Park, so that's weird, but anyway it's potentially a helpful way of finding areas which should be rich in shop POIs. I wonder if there's some other ways of improving landuse coverage in broad brushstrokes. Mobile app to use while on the bus, where you just sit and categorize the building types as you pass.
I want to see more expansion of building outline coverage, but people have mixed opinions about that. Everyone has their own priorities. For example I really want to avoid mapping housenumbers because I find that utterly ridiculous! :-)