The JOSM developers recently merged the AgPifoJ plugin into the core software, and last night I was pleased to discover some great little tweaks have been happening to improve the interface of these "photo mapping" features. A separate 'Manual adjust' button makes a lot of sense. Exactly how I was going to do it when I got round to it (never). Who's responsible for this? Give that man* a lolcat! (I'd give my compliments on this mailing list, but I forget how these old mailing list things work) Much credit to the original creator AgPifoJ too of course. Quite small improvements really, but my mapping approach is very much "photo mapping" in JOSM, and I hope that OSM newbies would get as far as trying this out, so any improvements to this feature help immensely.

Some documentation work to do still. I made a start by updating the Photo mapping page.

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I'm in São Paulo (in Brazil) at the moment, enjoying a sunny Christmas holiday ('#uksnow' WTF?) . I actually mapped it a little bit before back in 2007 last time I was on holiday here. Since then there's been some great progress made by the locals, on Saturday it was time to meet with those guys and do a São Paulo Mapping Party

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Christmas is nearly upon us. For me it feels like it's pretty much here, for several reasons:

• With levels of forward planning hirtherto unseen in my approach to Christmas shopping... I'm pretty much done! I've been forced to buy all the pressies for my family in advance and have them taken up to Yorkshire, because I'm heading away to Brazil tomorrow for Christmas in Sao Paulo with the girlfriend. This includes the super-exciting OpenStreetMap jigsaw. Check it out!
• I've already "opened" my first Christmas present. I have been given the gift of flickr. Thanks Sarah! Now I am a pro, and you know what this means.... Millions of photos of the insides of pubs can now be published in all their high-res tagged-up glory. Not to mention all the other crap I like to take pictures of. I shall have to spend a few hours on the uploadr and organisr some time soon, and bombard flickr with my collection. I hope the internet is ready for it.
• And lastly, it's clearly Christmas now because we've had our...

OpenStreetMap Christmas Party

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I was out in Clarkenwell yesterday on the hunt for jobs. I mean I was having a meeting with someone. I wasn't knocking on doors asking if people wanted their chimney sweeping. Anyway, what better way to wind down after a business meeting, than a spot of mapping?

I couldn't get a GPS lock at all for some reason (poor thing hasn't been used for a while), so I just took lots of photos. As long as you can follow how they join up logically, this usually works OK. I was taking the opportunity to expand on our area of building outlines coverage here:

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If you're a member of the OpenStreetMap foundation, have a dig around in your emails (check in spam) for one with a subject "OSMF Membership Vote". At the bottom is a link for voting. I suggest you use it to vote 'yes' to the ODbL.

We're creating a massive open licensed database. Nobody has ever done anything like this before (wikipedia is similar, but it's not a database). For the past year a team of people have been carefully crafting a new license which fits what we are doing. Have a quick look at the ODbL Plain Language Summary. It's very similar in principle to the cc-by-sa license (the one which isn't really designed for a database). So the decision is simple... right?

Sadly the OpenStreetMap community doesn't really do simple decisions. Every time it tries, things descend into insane debates. But we're going to have to do a decision now, and the decision should be 'yes' to ODbL

Last night we had a pub meet-up at the delightfully medieval pub The Windsor Castle in Notting Hill Gate. We had a good turn out actually, maybe 10/12 people all crammed around the one table. We drank many pints of Paulaner, and by soothing candlelight we discussed soothing topics such as the license.

Regarding the license, the commonly held viewpoint seemed to be "Can we please just get on with it". Obviously we didn't devise any master plan to settle all the disputes, but there was a feeling that there ought to be more peacemakers and people expressing a balanced view point on the mailing list, rather than wild extremes all the time.

Mr randomjunk explained how there are worse things in life than developing Potlatch, like for example developing financial systems for bankers.

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Yesterday was the end for our CloudMade London team, today is a new day full of OSMtastic opportunities. Or at least it was a new day. I've managed to fritter away the day doing nothing but stirring the communication channels (i.e. exactly what I said I need to not do). Well I did spend a fair amount of the day in bed with a hangover too I suppose.

Anyway I'm about to head out to a BCS talk by UKMap this evening. This is the first of many tech events I'll be keeping myself busy with (in the evenings at least)

So while I'm on that topic...

London pub meet-up this Thursday near Notting Hill Gate. Come along if you're in London.

OpenStreetMap Christmas Party 2009 - Friday 11th December. I'm hoping people will come along to this one even if they're not in London. A big party! How about it? Please sign up on the page there if you think you're going to be able to make it, and we'll see just how big the party will be. If anyone needs accomodation in London, list yourself for that too. I'm sure we can come to some arrangement. Contact me directly if you prefer. And for those who are nowhere near London, how about setting up a parallel party in your part of the world? Start getting in touch with nearby OSMers now, and see if you can make it happen!

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We had a nice long merry drinking session last night for our London pub meet-up.

We arrived a bit late because Andy was on a mission to map bicycle parking. I usually drop in a few of these while I'm out mapping, but when you're actually deliberately looking out for them (and nothing else), there's quite a few of them. Andy's knocked up a wee heat map:

But there's plenty more to map in central London. You can add the capacity too (tag docs)

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It's been quite a miserable weekend in London. Not great for mapping. Personally I did a little armchair mapping instead. There's some nice new aerial imagery for the Philippines which Andy has made available. This was a donation from DigitalGlobe showing an area hit by flooding after the Typhoons (and we thought our weather was bad) Check out Philippines HOT page for details.

Humanitarian OSMers will also be interested in mapkibera.org, Mikel's latest project which is in full swing right now. Note that this is not a remote mapping exercise (See note)

We'll be unleashing some other challenges for the U.S. TIGER fixup, on the CloudMade community blog pretty soon, since the dupe nodes clean-up is going so well.

But armchair mapping is not as good as real mapping. It's great to see the weather doesn't stop some people. There's been some good follow-up mapping taking place after some of our previous london mapping parties too: Roger in Farringdon, Tila in Paddingdon

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I had a good mapping session last night even though it was in the dark. My dad and I went around slice 10 which I'd picked because it's a one of those weird areas of central London I've never really explored much. Also in the aerial imagery I could see a churchyard with an interesting shape.

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My girlfriend and I struck another deal

Keep me happy <-> Keep girlfriend happy

Pleasure <-> Pain

Mapping <-> IKEA shopping

Exploring unnamed streets around White Hart Lane <-> Shopping for unnecessary household style clutter in a hideously crowded out-of-town warehouse

Just kidding. IKEA shopping is actually quite entertaining too. But it was great to get out and do some real mapping (unnamed streets yay!) in the White Hart Lane area, although I got a bit bogged down in POI mapping along High Road.

Seems we need to do this stuff at the weekends now. It's just getting way too dark for after work mapping. ....Oh go on then. Let's do one more.

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At the London mapping party last night we had a pretty big turn out for the pub, but not so many people out mapping beforehand. By 7:30 it was completely dark, so that might have had something to do with it.

Jon Burgess was along. We also had Brian who was telling us about his plans to do mapping in Nigeria.

I think the Monkey Puzzle goes on the list of good pubs for having an OSM meet-up. Spacious and quiet, and best of all it has a great big out-of-copyright map of London on the wall!

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I have a bit of blocked nose. Dreary weather. Start of another week. All very depressing,...

...but then I read Roger's diary. He can't make it to the mapping party so he's gone ahead and mapped his cake slice in advance in super-turbo-amazing detail! This kind of enthusiasm always cheers me up.

If you want to go looking for some "enthusiasm", we've had weekend mapping parties in Barcelona, Schnatgang Wuppertal, Hannover, Basildon, Trieste. We're down to 6501 duplicate nodes on the important highways. 43 blog posts, 22 SVN commits (development!), 37 posts to the forum (5 new ones for the unanswered list) and of course X million mailing list emails and Y million recent changes on the wiki

Too much enthusiasm for my Monday morning mind. Maybe I'll focus on London afterall. Here's some photos taken by Atilla at our last London mapping party:

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I was just watching an old talk by Ed Parsons from the State Of The Map 2008 (over a year ago in Limerick) in which he makes his excuses for Google's launch of MapMaker (clearly evil) and for some of google's other less open geo strategies. He talks a bit about aerial imagery. At topic which has resurfaced recently. There's a joking comment about the lack of "field work" mapping the Caribbean, which lead on to great things, and various other funny moments I'd forgotten about. Likewise Steve's keynote was a good one to remind myself of what's moved on since then, and what hasn't. Andy's gradually adding more videos listed here

In other news, I've scheduled the next London mapping party in Paddington next Tuesday featuring a cake of many flavours:

Before that there's a Basildon Mapping Party (quick train hop out to Essex) this weekend.

But if you want an armchair mapping challenge this weekend, check out the latest duplicate nodes display!

On Wednesday we had our special edition of the London mapping party marathon focussed on building mapping. This was an experiment in a slightly different mapping approach. Sketch some building outlines from Yahoo! aerial imagery beforehand, then go check them on the ground.

So how did it go?

Well my experience was pretty good. While doing my sketching, I left a bunch of FIXME nodes dotted around my area in spots where I wasn't too sure what shape the building was. I printed this out as an inverted colour screenshot from JOSM with search seleciton on 'FIXME'. We only had a brief mapping session because darkness comes a bit earlier these days, so I went directly to those FIXME spots to check them out. This was a surprisingly satisfying kind of mapping. Recognising buildings which I had been sketching around, and areas which I had been puzzling over, and discovering the solution to the puzzle.

Mixed responses from everyone else. Some people had a go at it, some others didn't fancy it.

"homework" requires more forward planning, to set aside some time for sketching beforehand. Maybe it feels like too much of a commitment in advance (Similar psychology applies to signing up in advance for attending a mapping party. People can be quite averse to doing this, even when they fully intend to come along)

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Don't forget, tomorrow night is Building Mapping night. Have you done your homework yet?

I did mine last week (teacher's pet), and I notice a couple of other people have sketched theirs. Slapping in building outlines quickly using Yahoo! imagery can feel a little bit careless, particularly given its overbearing rendering style. It's a high impact kind of mapping, without the effort of doing any real mapping, which all feels a bit wrong.

Of course we are going to try to do some real mapping tomorrow night, to double-check building outlines where the imagery wasn't clear. It remains to be seen how effective that will be.

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I've set a homework assignment for the London Mapping Party a week on Wednesday. Time to sort out those building outlines!

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We had a lot of fun in The Bear pub in the Camberwell for last night's London Mapping meet-up

Which country is this? (The fat double-line is the Atlantic coast)

That's right. It was pub quiz night again! The above map-based question appeared. There was even an aerial imagery recognition question. All plain sailing for team "OpenStreetMap" you'll be pleased to hear. In fact we did pretty well on the whole quiz this time. We got really stuck on the first question, which was "Do you want to take part in the quiz?", but after much discussion we hit upon the correct answer, and went on to win! Our vast winnings (~£38) have been donated to the OpenStreetMap foundation.

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I just blogged over here about the 5th Anniversary Party. With all that weekend excitement let's not forget there's mapping to be done!

Next London meet-up is TONIGHT in Camberwell South London. Enough of the sugary cakes, here's a cold harsh bitter digital cake with a sprinking of NoName streets:

Sign up on the wiki for a slice of the cake

If the state of my gastrointestinal system is anything to go by, then Monday's London mapping and curry meet-up in Brick Lane, was a real stonker. A good turn out as predicted, and we all met up and managed to spread onto several tables outside the stylish Vibe Bar, before heading on to have a meal in the "Standard Balti House" which was... well pretty standard really.

Brick Lane photos on facebook

I suppose this curry house might appear on the map soon (here somewhere) although nobody had signed up to take on the challenge of slice 2 in the end (cake diagram) Overall this is a pretty mixed and varied area to do mapping in. My slice 12 was fairly grotty along most of its length. In the facebook album there I've included a photo of a derelict building with several trees growing out of it. Without wanting to be too impolite to the residents of Whitechapel Road, it really does look like a 3rd world country in places :-)

As predicted a key topic of conversation was the OpenStreetMap Foundation elections. If you care about OpenStreetMap you really should be voting, and before you can vote you have to join, so get yourself sorted out now! The deadline for voting by email is Thursday midnight i.e. Friday 00:00 BST i.e. not long to go! In fact if you didn't join already you might be pushing it.

The next London mapping evening is scheduled for Tuesday 25th August in Camberwell, but before that on Saturday we've got the aformentioned AGM, and the worldwide party spectacular that is the OpenStreetMap 5th Anniversary Birthday party. The London location is now set. The Porterhouse. I like the beers in this place, and I shall be drinking many of them. Oh yes! [went to the mulberry bush in the end]

And for a little more event-overload, we've kicked off planning of WhereCamp EU.