On Thursday we had one of our regular London OpenStreetMap events. Standard stuff, but this one turned out a little different. We had quite a low turn out of people who normally regularly turn out, but then three new folks coming along, all of whom opted to join me for a data collection demonstration.

Happily it stopped raining and cleared up nicely in time for mapping. My cake slice slice number 6505 of cake number 116 involved some building mapping and remapping, for a bunch of big office buildings including the thing I always call “the Natwest tower”, more properly known as “Tower 42”. Tallest building in the city until the new Heron tower was built. When I say the city I mean “The City” financial area of London. Canary Wharf is taller, and is also in this city known as London, but not in “The City” if you know what I mean. Anyway I’d never looked around the base of this building. It’s quite interesting. Various complicated 3D arrangements of buildings which will be nightmare to input in all their detail. Also multi-level walkways, which I found quite interesting to explore. They are looking horribly run-down due to being made in concrete which looks messily stained thirty years on, and with drainage problems. There was also signs on the walkways saying “no public right or way” and “no through route”. I don’t know if they are looking so shabby because they are disused, or we’re disallowed from using them because they are shabby. Seems a shame. If only there were some wealthy financial institutions nearby who might spend a bit of money tidying it all up. Anyway, with signs dutifully ignored, we had fun exploring (me and the three people I was demonstrating to)

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In the Crosse Keys pub we sat at a tall the table in the corner and admired the cavernous vastness of it. Many hundreds of cubic metres of glorious wetherspoonsness:

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I had the feeling the three people I’d been demonstrating to all knew a thing or two about mapping already. Thomas from MapAction is obviously a GISer. I really hope we can make him into more of an OSMer, along with other MapAction folks. Florian was asking lots of questions about different mobile apps to track with, and had obviously tried a bit of mapping before. And then there was Tom Morris who quickly whipped out his laptop and used JOSM on the wetherspoons wifi to input some of the data we’d gathered!

Lots of interesting conversations with Tom actually. We got talking about his local mapping of countryside footpaths around Tunbridge Wells, and also…

Tom Morris is very involved in the wikipedia community. Long time contributor to the Wikipedia Signpost community newsletter. In his admining roles he gets embroiled in endless debates on many and varied topics which come up when you’re trying to collaborate on writing the entire canon of human knowledge.

It’s pretty interesting to look at some of the policies and power structures they have in place. These are big and complex, and it feels like wikipedia is building a government, which on the one hand is pretty impressive (I find it amazing), but on the other hand it’s widely criticised as heavyweight and bureaucratic. We were particularly chatting about the notability criteria, which seems to create a lot of debate, and whether there would ever be a parallel for that in OpenStreetMap. Given that we map the real world as it is, there’s less to debate, but I wonder whether deciding on a maximum level of detail is a bit like deciding on notability.

If you’re interested in polices and power structures of wikipedia and how they compare to OSM (also in relation to funding and staffing choices) have a read of Frederik’s ‘learning from wikipedia’ essay.

Incidentally discussion came up in this thread a couple of days ago, of whether or not OSM’s messaging system could follow wikipedia’s public “user talk page” approach. I think we should go this way, and I’d like to chat about it some more. Is this one for the ‘design’ mailing list?

And speaking of mailing list discussion, we also chatted about how OSM is perceived within the wikipedia community. Tom Morris was saying there’d been a discussion recently prompted by the TomTom thing. found it here. Some of the usual criticisms of OSM there, but on the whole it seems like wikipedia folks are getting in on the OpenStreetMap fun a bit more these days. Their new virtualised clusters of development tool servers known as ‘wikimedia labs’ already include some OpenStreetMap rendering experiments (see the OpenStreetMap mention here), and Tom hinted there may be more of that to come. Collaboration of the collaborations!

We’ll announce the next London OpenStreetMap summer event on the wiki page and on https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/OSMLondon. As ever I’m pondering whether an event of a different format should happen, and who could help organise it, and what venues could we use, but in couple of weeks time I’m sure we’ll just go to a pub again. And that will be whole lot of fun anyway :-) (other suggestions welcome!)