I've been slow to get around to this, but the next London OpenStreetMap pub meet-up is all set up for this coming Thursday. You can sign-up using a twitter account on Lanyrd.

...and look! There's a little OpenStreetMap image showing where the event venue is. This came about as a rather awesomely speedily pro-active response by lanyrd to my cheeky tweet this week. It's not a big switch to OSM. In fact it's quite a minor switch, only showing OpenStreetMap in place of boring old google maps if the a topic of 'OpenStreetMap' is set on an event. But this is some kind of milestone. Of all the websites I've tried using to pimp OSM London events on over the years... we finally have one which doesn't show/link the wrong map alongside our event! (It's literally been annoying me for years)

So yes. We'll be at the Penderel's Oak on Thursday, and having said all that, the OpenStreetMap wiki page is still the best place for directions to find us at the pub, and read all about what the event is (it's not complicated) So link people to that if you know anyone who might like to come along on Thursday.

Last time we were at the Monkey Puzzle and had a couple of new faces, Andy and Tom, who sat next to Andy and Tom in the pub to create some kind of crazy alternating Andy Tom situation. One of them... either Andy or Tom I can't remember... was telling me about his site Londinium.com which is a London related website directory, and we chatted about how OpenStreetMap could be mixed in to this e.g. using our data on POIs with 'website' tags.

Great to have Paul The Archivist along too. I met him at WhereCampUK in Nottingham a while back.

Of course we also had the mighty Richard Fairhurst along. Creator of Potlatch, and currently serving on the OSM foundation board. He was in town for a canal-related event, and I pictured him clambering out of canal barge in Paddington basin after an scenic journey along the great Charlbury to London canal, before joining us in the pub, but I'm not sure if that's quite what happened.

Overall we had a pretty stonking turn-out, and had to do some amusing chair swapping so we could all have a turn at eating our meal at the table!

more photos by Alex

We had some pretty interesting discussions about organisational structure of the OSMF, and particularly job titles such as "chairman" within in the board.

We talked about Andy's little scheme to sell SD cards containing OpenCycleMap maps for garmin. Currently he has to faff around a lot with envelopes and physically posting them to people. It's just a fun little side-line for him at the moment, but I'd love to see these in every outdoor shop alongside the other maps and gadgets they always stock. We were talking about how he could do some sort of distribution deal, or just find someone to help him with "retail packaging".

We talked about the remapping. In London the bad map is looking a lot more clear nowadays, particularly after Ed Avis accepted (although I was secretly looking forward to deleting a lot of his low quality contributions in my neighbourhood, but I suppose his acceptance is good news) But there is some important data such as tube stations which are very old, and so are tending to be contaminated with non-CT-accepter edits. We should probably make sure those don't disappear! Contact and re-map!<.a>

If all that map-chat sounds like fun, or if you'd like to have some other techie-talk conversations with OpenStreetMap folks, or if you'd like come along as a newbie and learn some basics about OpenStreetMap, the pub is a great place to do these things! See you in the Penderel's Oak Holborn on thursday!