This time last week we had a big London Hack Weekend kindly hosted by the london hackspace guys, who also spied on us with their webcam and made a time-lapse video.

London Hack Weekend video on Youtube

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It's not only me taking photos of London OSM events. Here's a couple of nice photos from last Saturday's events:

Emilie Laffray giving her Open Knowledge Conference talk

(cc-by-sa-nc Pantera and Mateusz)

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Londoners! A reminder about various London events coming up TOMORROW (Saturday 24th):

• Spacemakers Brixton mini mapping party - Let's get more people along with their laptops. Should be fun.


• Open Knowledge Conference including a little talk on OSM in Haiti.


• Or there's also the Witham mapping party if you fancy a journey out of London

Just had to mention that before I describe last Wednesday's mapping evening and pub meet-up in Holborn, which was quite eventful.

We had along a couple of interesting people (not that I don't find the rest of you interesting you understand) :

Adam Mullineux who works for TfL joined me from the beginning for a mapping demonstration. I was doing my thing of checking building outlines which I'd sketched in from Yahoo the night before. I did a lot of talking and explaining to try and make this rather tedious task more interesting, but talking at the same time as mapping is actually quite difficult.

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(photo - cc-by2 - Paul Miller on flickr)

Tomorrow night it's time for our regular evening mapping then pub event again. It's a volcano special! If you are stranded in london, why not join us? We're always keen to welcome new faces at our pub meet-ups, and it's a great opportunity to learn about the worldwide not-for-profit mapping collaboration known as OpenStreetMap.org

If you know someone who is stranded in London due to volcano ash, send them the link for tomorrow night! http://bit.ly/londonosm3

The weather is looking good, unless you were hoping for some ash-suppressing rainfall. So here we go again. I've done my pre-mapping building sketching for my slice of the cake. Anyone else helping with the spread of the pale maroon patch? No? just me? Well I shall see you in the pub anyway. We don't normally do wetherspoons, but there's an real ale festival on to keep the ale folks happy. There might even be wifi.

We have a busy London Events schedule.

Sat 17th April - Crisis Camp London
Monthly workshop event and meet-up group for technology enthusiasts and other volunteers who get together to work on projects related to disaster relief. They provide wifi and pizza, and we can use it as a place to go and do OSM hacking, but there's also lots of less techy types there who are interesting in learning to contribute to OpenStreetMap (fresh newbies!) So worth getting a few people to go along to this. Jenny and Steve8 are already signed up. I thought this time we could get some people mapping China. Did I mention pizza?.

Wed 21st April - Holborn evening mapping party and pub meet-up
Cake diagram is now available. Sign up! Sign up! Usual fortnightly meet-up, plus I just got off the phone with Stuart Carter, GIS Manager at Southwark Council, who will come along to meet us all at the pub.

Sat 24th April - Open Knowledge Conference 2010
User:Melaskia will be giving a talk about OpenStreetMap Haiti. Thanks to her for taking on that task. Turns out it's only a 15 minute slot. They'll be lots of other interesting topics and people there, so you might like to go along to cheer her on / help answer questions. Or alternatively...

Sat 24th April - Brixton newbies mapping event. Volunteers needed
I see this is as a relatively normal mini mapping party get-together, which I would guess we would have at least five or six people joining in with (and deciding to come at the last minute as usual), BUT it'll only happen if I can get some people to be "the organisers" (just a little bit of commitment to show up 'n' stuff) So if you think you can manage that, please let me know

...more fortnightly meet-ups of course. Plus

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Last week I was wondering around the streets of Soho gawping upwards, paying particular attention to the shapes of the tops of buildings. Photographing them while trying not bump into people, and trying to recognise features I'd seen in the aerial imagery. It's a peculiar fuzzy roof-top world you get to see from above, which can be quite difficult to relate to the street-level view. Anyway this behaviour must've seemed quite odd to my old colleague, when I bumped into him. It was an awkward kind of conversation. He said something like "Wow. Great to see you. I'm on my way somewhere, so can't stop to chat, but... what *are* you doing Harry?" to which the only response is to try to explain OpenStreetMap in 10 seconds flat. Think I did OK.

For the mapping party I think most people opted to skip the mapping and go direct to the pub. Maybe this was because my cake diagram covered an already mapped patch, and my explanation for this came a bit late (and people just aren't convinced by the whole building outlines idea) But I am going to keep organising them around the city centre, because it's only 1 hour's mapping pre-pub at this stage anyway. So c'mon. How about some building outlines?

Clearly the pub is the priority. And quite a pub session it was. Good turn-out.

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It's mapping time tonight! First of the London evening mapping parties for 2010. The weather's glorious. I'm so excited I might pop out at lunchtime and do some mapping just to tide me over until this evening!

I didn't do a very good job of sorting out the details in plenty of time. Sorry out that. Busy busy. If you didn't already see it... CAKE!

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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.

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Well this is embarrassing... (to quote the firefox rescue start-up screen when it fails to rescue anything)

I posted details of my waychains fixup tool, and alongside a red and green graph I commented that there had been very little progress with fixing interstates over the past few months. But it turns out that was bollocks. The actual graph should have looked more like this

Unfortunately I only have two valid data points now, but after a wee correction we're up to 721 paired refs, with the total number of different refs increasing to 1684. Percentagewise that an increase to 42% paired. Progress! Let's see what it looks like: All paired waychains map. Nice!

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My waychains tool has been analysing U.S. interstates for just over a month now. During that time the stats have inched up and down a bit, but mostly held at about 26% paired (currently 290 paired out of 1112 different ref values)

The map showing pairing progress still looks about the same as it did in January:

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I've been very busy spreading myself too thinly again lately. Busy with some work at placr. Busy with lots of other bits 'n' bobs such as wherecamp.eu preparations, wiki Wednesdays presentations, and dealing with s**t (literally)

Things I haven't had much time to think about include scheduling a hack weekend, seeing what mapping can/can't be done in Chile and sorting out the wiki pages accordingly, and other minor little things like doing freelancing work I might one day get paid for.

At the weekend I tricked myself into thinking this was all under control and I could relax a little. What did I do to relax? I went out mapping!

In the sunshine we went and added this wobbly path through Queens wood. That's about as green and wild as mapping gets round here. Plenty more woodland paths to add if anyone else wants to venture into this unexplored jungle.

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We had a London pub meet-up back at the Monkey Puzzle in Paddington on Wednesday.

It was just the usual crew there, and we had plenty to chat about. The obvious topic of the day was reactions to Steve's big push for a front page re-design, which seemed to have wound a few people up on several levels. Personally I only read the blog posts/tweets (steve, TomH, Blackadder, RichardF, Steve again, etc) but from that I can gather that there was a few "lively debates" on the mailing list. So we chatted about all of that, and about how evil Steve is.

We did also get onto actually discussing front page U.I. here's a few snippets of what was said:

-Should the (+) layer picker be expanded by default?

-What layers should be on there? Add lots? need to be scaleable tile services

-Does anyone use the maplint layer? Can be hazardous to new users

-Change (+) to the nice new icon representing layers

-Get rid of the textual description of OSM?

-Increase width of the left column?

-Put a larger search bar at the top? Could be bad for netbooks. Prime screen space

I could try to summarise various high level ideas, but that's been done by various blog posts (e.g. those linked above). Actually I think a good place to do that would be the Front Page Design wiki page (I haven't done so yet. I think it would work well if we move the comment/opinion off that page and state various ideas)

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Tomorrow (Saturday 20th Feb) there's another Crisis Camp London event happening near Russel Square from 10 a.m. till 5p.m. Crisis Camp is a group of technology enthusiasts and other volunteers who get together in London, and other cities worldwide, to work on projects related to disaster relief. Currently very active in relation to Haiti.

There's some details on our wiki. For OpenStreetMap its a good opportunity to have a mini hack day, since the venue has all the ingredients needed. Free wifi and free pizza!

We had a few people along last Saturday, and we set up a table for OpenStreetMap hacking, but we were also advising a handful of other people who were just learning OpenStreetMap and making their first edits (people looking for ways to help in Haiti). This kind of thing will no-doubt happen again tomorrow, so any OpenStreetMappers should feel welcome to come along and help. Not just hackers.

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An important announcement from last nights meet-up. We're having an impromptu little London hack day TOMORROW (Saturday 13th). Apologies for the short notice. If you do want to come along and hack on OpenStreetMap or related tools, or just chat with some people who are doing so, you'd be very welcome to join us. Wifi and pizza provided! I'm going to aim to be there from 10a.m.

That was one of many super-important discussions we had at last Wednesday's London pub meetup.

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11 people signed up for tonight's pub meet-up at the Cheshire Cheese Fleet St on upcoming.org Count 'em! It's all the usual crowd, but I think it's a good idea to get everyone signed up like this. It pushes us up the upcoming rankings.

I always quite liked the tagged-up interlinked flickr photo'ed goodness of upcoming.org, but it has some limitations and I sense it has fallen out of favour a little lately (less activity on the London geeks group) So where do people organise/share event calendars these days? I just listed the event on geekery.in which I believe is a project by someone in the London Ruby gang. Seems a bit rough around the edges, and I'm not liking the big fat postcode-located google maps. Even so... I recommend everyone creates an account on there and add themselves as attendees :-)

We should try to come to more of a decision about hack days / hack weekends. Let's discuss this tonight. Hack weekends seem to be preferred, but...

I had an idea for a sort of mini-hackday. All we need to do is all go along to a Crisis Camp London event one Saturday. If we do some hacking loosely related to one of their projects, then I'm sure we'd be welcome to encamp ourselves at a table there. They need more technical people to attend anyway... and look! There's a "project" called OpenStreetMap - Improving OSM tools (related to crisis mapping), but obviously any improvement to OpenStreetMap site or editing tools could arguably be within that scope. So we can go along and hack on OpenStreetMap with wifi provided and even Pizza!

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A last Wednesday's London pub meet-up we had PIES! The Daniel Gooch in Bayswater seems to be run by a Scottish chap with access to little Scottish pies. We brought along our own Scottish chap who verified the scottishness of the pies. Rather good, and a bargain at £4.50. Other good things about the pub included cashback at the till, cheap soft drinks, and an interesting ceiling. The pub might have lost marks for having a big loud football match on, but we managed to hide down a funny little hole away from the noise. Here's photos of us in our funny little hole:

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I was just trying to make sense of a set of photos and a trace I took last week in Hatton Garden. My NaviGPS claimed to have a lock, but it turns out the trace was all over the place, leaving me to puzzle over where I really was when I took photos of each shop, as well as the usual problem of deciding which side of the road I was pointing the camera at, all made more tricky by the winter low-light conditions. But the most annoying thing about this mapping session... They were all jewellery shops or is that jewelry shops? Either way, they're not that exciting. Anyone got a rendering showing them?

Maybe I should stick to Haiti mapping or catching up on my Brazil mapping. Speaking of which, it's great to see User:deltabrasil has been busy in Salvador. Another big Brazilian city I made a start on while I was on holiday there back in 2007.

Anyway back in wintry London...

Pub meet-up tonight! 7p.m. Bayswater. A few people signed up on upcoming.org (in fact judging by normal sign-up ratios, there'll be loads of us at the pub!) Everyone's welcome

There is, of course, wasteful duplication of effort between the two communities: OpenStreetMap and Google MapMaker. That's a worldwide waste of effort, but there's been a few people pointing this out in relation to the Haiti Earthquake mapping. here and here and here. OpenStreetMap releases data with a sharealike license. Meanwhile Google MapMaker doesn't normally release their data at all, but in Haiti it is released with a non-commercial license. These license terms mean that neither community can import data from the other. Surely there is a solution that would mean all the data comes together on one place or the other? A solution would be for Google MapMaker to drop their non-commercial clauses. This is very do-able, but will google do it? Another solution would be for OpenStreetMap to go public domain in the Haiti region. This could be do-able, but...

Part of me recoils from the prospect of Google MapMaker importing OSM's Haiti data, and effectively claiming it as their own. We've done so well to steal a march on google and all other map providers, so that people are coming OpenStreetMap for the best map data of Haiti. It feels satisfying that all those misguided fools who contribute to the closed MapMaker system, are now looking jealously at OpenStreetMap haiti coverage. But of course we should put all such thoughts to one side at a time like this. As Mikel said on the topic"whatever can be done for the best benefit to the crisis response should be done". So let's think about what could be done.

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How many country names can you think of which end with the letter 'O'?

We huddled like penguins at last night's deep deep winter pub meet-up. Not because it was cold in the pub, but because we were a bit short of space around our little table in the upstairs room of the Red Lion (The pub is even on the map now. Thanks Dan!). In total there must have been ten or fifteen people. Nick Black came along and the girls were out in force: Jenny, Emma and Francine.

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The Bristol map looks pretty nice. I think the landuse coverage has been done quite thoroughly, which makes it pleasing on the eye. I imagined it to be quite complete, but it turned out my mate's road was missing. Well not any more! Yesterday I had a nice little snowy stroll around this neighbourhood, but not before building the OSMer snowman:

He's demonstrating the use of a NaviGPS. When you're walking down one side of a street near buildings, it can help if you hold it to one side like this :-)

Still quite a few noname streets in Bristol actually. Pretty landuse coverage can be deceptive.

Londoners, don't forget pub tomorrow night. The sign-up on upcoming.org is pretty poor so far, but I know you're all just being non-committal.