I've got behind on a few things lately, there's some upcoming events which have crept up on me like a ninjapanthersnake. Damn those event ninjapanthersnakes!

The OpenStreetMap Government Technical Workshop and hack weekend is this coming weekend (TOMORROW), but sign-up is now closed. If you want to come along now I'll have to ask if we can add your name to the building entry list, which maybe alright, or it may be awkward. I'm not sure.

I would still like it if we got some last minute attendance requests from some of our target government GIS type people, so if you know anyone who knows anyone, tell them to give me a call. Here's a pretty PDF you could send them.

Due to pesky holidays getting in the way, I wasn't able to promote this quite as much as I would've liked to those target people, but it doesn't actually matter. It means we have more OSMers to help the people who are coming, and our fallback plan is to just do general OSM hacking. We all love a bit of general OSM hacking. In fact this is the plan for the Sunday anyway. So let's see how it goes.

If you find this government<-->OpenStreetMap collaboration interesting, take a look at the UK local councils wiki page, where we have some thrown in braintstorming ideas at the moment. It was my intention to write something similar to this, based on this, or perhaps just rewrite this wiki page, to be a more descriptive "white paper" report on the possibilities. But still in early stages there, so feel free to help flesh things out with more description, or add new ideas.

London summer mapping party - Wednesday 30th June. Now that the evenings are properly long, we should probably try to get to some lesser mapped areas outside the city centre. So I'm going to set up a cake diagram around Belsize Park where I happen to know we're missing a load of POIs. This is zone 2, so not too difficult to get to. A reasonable compromise I feel.

It's rather hot on the heals of the hack weekend, but we need to squeeze it between a few other things. There's a couple of interesting events happening the following day:

MapAction BCS talk Thu 1st July - One in a series of free BCS geo related presentations. You can expect this talk to make mention of OpenStreetMap. MapAction have used our maps on several occasions, particularly Haiti, but people involved in Humanitarian OpenStreetMapping need to investigate working closer with them.

MappingForChange launch event - Thu 1st July MappingForChange (mappingforchange.org.uk) is a new organisation all about "community mapping and participatory GIS work" related in some way with UCL and with Muki Haklay. This does relate to OpenStreetMap. I would expect OpenStreetMap to be the central enabler behind such an initiative, but it's not clear what their plans are. I guess the launch event would be the place to find out. We should have some OSMers going along to it. There seems to be several phases kicking off at 4.45pm, but guess you don't need to be there from the beginning.

So those two were just a couple of semi-OSM-related geo events I've spotted, sadly landing on the same evening. I've not actually decided which one to go to yet. Note that they both require pre-registration.

I've got a couple of wiki events I'm off to. The Big Wikipedia meet-up should be good. Do come along if you're interested in wikipedia. If you haven't heard of it, wikipedia is like OpenStreetMap but without the map :-) Also London Wiki Wednesdays the following Wednesday

And then there's a little conference happening...

State Of The Map 2010 in Girona

Hugely excited about that. There's a couple of funny videos appearing on the blog. I'm flying out Thursday in time for the full three days including the Friday 9th business day. I'm also sticking around for a little while on the Monday. Nice.