Sounds like fun! So you're setting off on the mapping bus trip tomorrow? Hope it goes well. I shall be on holiday in São Paulo in April. Maybe we organise an OSM meet-up then.

Thanks for a well thought out posting on this topic Alex. We had a long chat over burritos about it too, and I talked about the pros and cons. I know you're aware of all ths issues. I'm in two minds about it.

Armchair mapping can be quite "interfering" and discouraging to real mapping (See Armchair Mapping wiki page I recently wrote with some attempt to be balanced)

But we want better, and particularly more even/consistent, building coverage. Tracing from bing is the best (really the only) way to get that data initially. Ideally this would be followed up with a re-check on the ground. Thats what I've done in small patches during mapping parties throughout the summer, and I encouraged others to do the same. I've been quite cautious while proposing a focus on building outlines at mapping parties, and taken the time to explain the plan and try to get buy-in. But it seems like there's not much interest in that style of mapping from other Londoners, with a few exceptions. We've made slow progress particularly in spreading eastwards from Soho towards Mayfair and the Buckingham Palace area you show there.

I sense there may be even less enthusiasm, or maybe outspoken objection to a pure armchair mapping approach. from some. This is why I've stopped short of suggesting this myself. Even now I'm tempted to sit on the fence.

...but I think on balance I would support the plan for a bit of sketching prior to the olympics. In laying out the details though I think we can take a cautious approach. Firstly I think it's important that we do it from-the-centre-working-outwards, always aiming for even consistent coverage. We don't want somebody deciding to work from West London moving Eastwards, but then getting bored. Even just filling in an area which is unconnected to the central area, creates a messy looking result. Secondly we should agree an approach (OpenStreetBugs? fixme nodes?) for labelling spots which need follow up on-the-ground, because I need a way of choosing where we need to go mapping this summer! But I think this will help to highlight that this is not an exercise in dumping low quality map data into an uncaring database. Local mappers will be seeing the data arrive, and this is a positive thing. Armchair mappers should be adding data with their support, and work together to make a better map. We should be quite clear that flagging bugs is an expected part of the armchair mapping activity, and figure out examples of the kind of imagery interpretation which requires follow up. I'd be more comfortable if we also had better approaches for flagging imagery offsets, and imagery which is out of date, but that needs technical solutions.

Check out the existing Video tutorials and also tools and ideas on the 'Video tutorial development' wiki page. I've had a go at making tutorial videos myself. More videos can't hurt, but I'm quite interested in how we (somebody, a team of OpenStreetMap community folks, perhaps with "outside" help) might progress onto making some really slick refined short videos, both for basic tutorials and also for pitching the idea as a marketing/promotion video.

'OSM Map On Garmin' wiki page presents various options (I think most people use Mkgmap) , and also gives a step-by-step guide.

Diving in now in this area (picked at random) I see there's still some misaligned streets. Lots more work to do, but maybe it's better than before.

Looks great. Did you have to manually put together these vector boundaries though? or where did you get them from? (The data in the file here: http://forge.codedgraphic.com/osm/imagery_coverage/data.js )

How can we get a better view of what's been added worldwide? There's a discussion here about getting updates in to the bing coverage analyser, but it seems that's going to take a while. So far I haven't seen any map, from bing or otherwise, which gives a good overview of what's been added (I'm aware there's several PDFs which don't give a good overview)

We have a wiki page X-Plane. Feel free to edit that with more information / illustrations.

Nice. One day I will know enough portuguese to read it! (My lessons are going slowly) But it looks nice. Now we have a little brazilian flag on the Press coverage page!

That's a lovely story... but what does it have to do with OpenStreetMap?

Well Ed was also saying that the google salesman couldn't point him at any instrumentation show how far over the limits he was, but maybe they'll make this clearer at some point.

If they were charging based on how much it costs them to serve the maps, surely it would make most sense (purely from an engineering standpoint) to count up requests coming into those expensive services (tiles and geocoding).

But then again that makes for a charging scheme which doesn't match the way web designers think of 'page views', and google already has mechanisms to enforce access to their tiles only via their javascript (though I don't actualy know how that works. Some sort of token exchange?)

If one user pans and zooms around an awful lot, does that cost the same as somebody making a fleeting glimpse? All very mysterious. So you reckon big sites definitely have to switch away to OpenLayers or Leaflet to avoid the charges? bummer ....hurray for Mapstraction!

Yeah I was expecting that site to help me, but actually it only has pre-made maps of London, Dublin, Glasgow, Edinburgh and New York. Can a kindle download and display a PDF file? If so, how well does it cope with the output from Maposmatic? and wasn't there an option to do multi-page atlases with Maposmatic? I started playing around with this, but didn't get very far.

Saturday 17th? I think that make this an OpenStreetMap Christmas Party!

Well there's what you've seen out of the remappings on OWL. That's one thing, ...but then there's this negativity directed at OSM and the OSMF, with accusation seemingly being that these organisations are explicitly instructing people to "copying via remapping to get round licensing/CT issues". If you see that message somewhere, please help to fix it. There shouldn't be any inconsistency with the message that data should never copied from incompatible sources. Everyone can help with ensuring that the message is clear, and feel free to have a friendly discussion about what the message should be if you are unsure.

Remapping principles. "Remapping means 'replacing with new content from a source compatible with the CT's'. It does not mean simply copying the old content - that might infringe the original mapper's rights.".

A lot of data may disappear. Not really that much, and not really "disappear".

At this stage there is still an effort to win hearts and minds, and get people to log-in and tick the box, to help with this transition. You post a diary entry "OSM/OSMF has become a farce". Sorry you feel that way ...but really. You're just making yourself part of the problem.

Well you'll have to wait for the diary entry about that event, but I can disclose that in fact no mapping was done. Although we do need to do more buildings around the Monkey Puzzle.

Yeah! Edit more more more!

By the way, there's another style of map rendering available as a separate layer, called 'osmarender'. As it happens this shows sport=swimming and leisure=swimming_pool tags, with swimming icons. So you can see here a swimming icon showing up from the other node which was on there already. This layer doesn't re-render very quickly after changes are made to the data though. Not sure how long you have to wait. Maybe several days.

Welcome! Looks like a great edit to me, although I think someone actually added that swimming pool already. Is it called 'Uittamon uimahalli'. Someone's put a node a little further to the north: osm.org/browse/node/267181235 They have the name and another tag sport=swimming. In fact your leisure=swimming_pool tag is better/more important.

My recommendation actually would be to put all of these tags on the way (the outline of the building). If you copy all the tags onto there, including the name tag, then you could delete both of those nodes.

But anyway... Welcome to OpenStreetMap! Keep at it!

Hi Sam. It's cool that you have all this GPS data. Looks like it covers a massive area centred around Perth. I just picked a spot, downloaded the GPS points and quickly found some roads which needed adding. Pretty useful I'd say!

I didn't stay up to listen to the full match but my curiosity did get the better of me today. I should've stuck with it. Sounds like quite a game. A two-out, two-strike, two-RBI triple in the bottom of the ninth, a two-run homer in the 10th, and a solo walk-off home run to finish it!

So now there's one more game playing in about 10 hours time. Last night I was pondering whether to keep the contest open for "extra innings", but now I think the referee has already blown the final whistle (wait... does baseball have any whistling?). We know you're just annoyed the ToffeHof pipped you to 3rd place :-)

@LivingWithDragons Richard's not Canadian? I learn something new every day. Come to think of it, I'm not sure if fx99 is German.

@ToeBee Entire state of Kansas? Spectacular! It would be cool to do some other geo analysis on the baseball edits which took place. Which state has the most, or which metro area has the most, or even better... calculate the distance from each baseball diamond to the local MLB team's stadium. Which team won???

Interesting what you say about El Dorado. I've certainly found pockets where TIGER data is hopelessly off. This gives me the idea that we should do some sort of manual mapped out rapid assessment of different areas across the states, to identify areas not just of untouched TIGER data, but untouched and particularly bad TIGER data.