On Tuesday we were over in South Kensington. It's a busy time for me at work at the moment, so I had to work late and didn't arrive on time to do any mapping. I arrived looking hot and flustered after cycling across London. Nothing a few pints couldn't fix, but I shall have to do my cake slice some other time.

In the Zetland Arms pub we got ourselves a cosy table and sat around chatting about many different things:

The news of the world "phone hacking" scandals were all over the news. Is it really "hacking" though? We decided it probably is, since most other hacking also involves a cheap trick like guessing someone's password. That got us onto various aspects of password security. I admitted that I hadn't bothered changing the admin password on my wifi router until the day of my BBQ two years ago when I knew all the OpenStreetMap hackers would be round my house :-) TomH and Firefishy have some important passwords to look after. Me I just get given the password for moderating the talk-au mailing list. Oh joy! (Communications Working Group)

We talked about building height levels. latlon.org shows a nice 3D rendering of buildings where the height tag has been set. We talked about mapping these (in fact Alex has been mapping these). We talked about using a view e.g. from Parliament Hill, and setting building heights from this somehow. Probably not very possible in a super-automated way, but there's surely some building height information there for manual extraction.

That led onto discussion of OSM in 3D games (also discussed on IRC recently and we have a 'Games' wiki page) Someone should make a Doom or quake level converter. OSM has been brought into some Flight gear, and Xplane flight sims. That led onto retro games ideas such as the awesome 8bit cities rendering. I was saying this would be a whacky addition to Firefishy's OpenWhateverMap, but unfortunately it's not worldwide (nowhere near. Just some cities) although OpenWhateverMap does use a 404 request handler which swaps to a different tileset (nifty). Also what about OpenStreetMap as a text adventure?

We discussed the idea of rendering GPS traces as tiles (See Alex Morega's experiment in Romania) Quite interesting. In theory (and from an elegant use of technology point of view) it shouldn't offer any speed advantage for seeing traces in editors... but in practice it probably does, particularly where traces are very dense. Firefishy did a little investigation of dense patches of GPS points worldwide. There's a truck depot in eastern Europe somewhere which has about a bazillion GPS points within a 10x10m area.

The Russians are going crazy for OpenStreetMap. We've seen this with the increase in software and video niftiness coming from there, but Russia has been ranking highly for OSM request traffic for some time (map). They've had a few PR successes there, including some radio show appearances. We need more PR in the UK. Firefishy was pointing out that we've never managed to get proper direct coverage of OpenStreetMap on the BBC (only one or two side mentions) How about it BBC? PR could be a responsibility of the Communcations working group... but then there are very few aspects of OSM which do not fit the description of "communication". We also talked about promotion, and recruiting new mappers via wikipedia. There's a lot of crossover between the two projects, and a lot of people who contribute in both, but it seems there's isn't complete buy-in from a lot of a wikipedians, otherwise we might expect that they would stop giving such prominence to google on their geolocation pages like this. I suspect this is a symptom of OSM coverage (and general enthusiasm for OSM) being not so good in the U.S. still (where a lot of 'en' wikipedians are) Why they are still keen to highlight "wikimapia" on there I have no idea. Wikimapia pretends to be an open licensed wiki map, but based on google's aerial imagery, it'll never be that.

At the pub there was a fair amount of excitement about the impending SOTM EU conference in Vienna. Just finished happening this weekend of course. There was a couple of people in the pub who were going. Not me sadly. Matt was saying the talks schedule looked pretty awesome, but fairly academic in style, being as it was organised at a university. Meanwhile the U.S. conference in September might have fewer really interesting OSM tech talks, but there are a few notable exceptions. We can expect a great talk from Michal Migurski for example.

We talked about this, and about how his creations (such as Walking Papers) are executed so well with great user experience, and snappy textual explanations, while in the background they're sometimes remarkably simple, and not necessarily architected beautifully. Perfection is the enemy of good. For instance Walking papers could be implemented using vector PDF for nicer quality prints, but this way it is built, and built with time to spare on UX. At some point walking papers was switched to OpenStreetMap mapnik, whereas before it defaulted to CloudMade fineline style. You can still switch to this nice ink-saving white background style using the 'Provider' drop-down. Suspect it may have been CloudMade's failure to update their maps which spurred that change. Someone should develop a 'printable for mapping' Mapnik style, like the inverted colour JOSM wireframe screenshots I often use.

Still on the topic of the main SOTM in the U.S. We were hearing that the video competition hadn't attracted many entries. If this is indeed the case, then they may still be accepting late entries, and if you enter then you'd in with a good chance. I suggested to Alex to pass on this message to the guys behind some of the awesome Russian mapping videos. [UPDATE: Competition closed. Gregory won it!]

OSMers with Garmin units should check out Derick's article: OpenStreetMap Quality Assurance with a Garmin GPS. He was showing us the results in the pub. He converted bugs, particularly OS Locator bugs (UK only), into city POIs. These then show up prominently as selectable green blobs. Simple trick!

We had a discussion about the license implementation plan, and some technical data deletion process things. It think I even started that discussion. What was I thinking?

We talked about Imperial College. There's a few OSMers who are IC alumni, myself included. We should perhaps work harder on recruiting existing students. I only know of Edgemaster. Hoping to see him along at the Zetland Arms, but perhaps this was badly timed. It's not actually term time at the moment. We really should engage with students in some organised event. A stand at "freshers fair" in October would be cool, but maybe you have to be a union club/society for that.

Finally we hatched a plan. A stupendously marvellously wonderful plan...

The London OpenStreetMap MEAT-up Marathon!

The plan so far is...

• BBQ at Derick's place Saturday 30th July


• BBQ at Harry's place Saturday 6th Aug

Keep those dates free! But we'll probably organise some of the details via closed facebook events, so be friendly with me and Derick on facebook.