Took part in the second WYLUG micro-mapping party today - arranged by Paul Brook this time.

JohnLeach and I went out in the car again, starting in the industrial area off Pontefract Lane in South-East Leeds then winding north to East Leeds proper and around some housing estates. After a short refreshment break, we did a few residential estates off York Road.

We also saw a tank and a fight plane parked on top of a concrete merchants for no apparent reason.

It was a good day - 7 people took part in total and we all covered different bits of the inner city so more and more blank bits are getting filled in. Hurrah.

When I first came to OSM, jeez, perhaps THREE whole weeks ago, Southport, my hometown, was pretty much an empty void on OSM. I made the obvious joke on a number of occasions.

Because OSM is a pretty much entirely awesome, it looks like someone (called Dave Edwards) has been adding bits since then (or he added them before but I ignored them because they weren't in my bit of Southport) and I got itching to start helping out over there too. But I've been too busy over here to make the pilgrimage back to the 'port to collect GPS traces - so I thought I'd have a look at the NPE maps instead.

Around my mum and dad's house (my home for 18 years) in the east of Birkdale, things haven't changed much in the last 50 years (obvious joke number 2) so it was easy to get my bearings. I got up tracing pretty quickly and could remember all the local road names off the top of my head, and could add in other things like mini-roundabouts and Post Offices etc too. I had to double-check a couple of pub names with my mum but aside from that, it was easy going.

After I mapped the immediate area around them, I started mapping in other bits I know like the back of my hand - around friends' houses, schools and pubs I went to etc. It's nowhere near comprehensive yet but I've got a lot of the bigger roads around Birkdale in now.

I'll double-check all the positioning when I go over with a GPS unit in a few weeks but at least Southport is looking a bit less empty now - and it's a start. I've also marked everything as source=npe so if some GPSer comes along before I get to check it, then they'll know to trust their positioning rather than mine.

(Copied from my personal blog)

We held our first WYLUG(ish) Open Street Map micro-mapping event on Sunday and it went well.

Six of us - me, John, Paul, Tim, Simon and Rob - went out mapping and then we went back to Dave's afterwards to start turning the traces into maps.

It was the first OSM event I've organised but I had some advice from Tim (aka chippy) about timings etc and I think it worked out ok. We met for about half an hour to decide where we were all going and we decided on filling in some blank spots around East Leeds. I'd printed out maps and highlighted areas I thought needed attention, and once we'd double-checked no other speedy Leeds-er had filled in our selected spots between me printing the maps out in the early hours of Saturday and us meeting on Sunday afternoon, we headed out.

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I've organised a micro-mapping session in Leeds for this Sunday.

It's been organised through WYLUG but anyone can join in, WYLUGer or non-WYLUGer.

We're meeting at Becketts Bank (Wetherspoons) on Park Row, Leeds at 2pm on 24th Feb 2008 and I expect it to last until 5pm-6pm-ish.

Full details can be found at http://www.wylug.org.uk/2008/02/wylug-social-and-openstreetmap-session-sunday-24th-february-2008/

My first edit - woo!

I added both Mitford Road and Simpson Grove but John's got the © on Simpson because he joined it to Hall Road afterwards.

Am finding JOSM to be a PITA and am off to see if I can get some guidance from some more experienced people on IRC. Failing that, I'll just collect some traces and fill them in after we have the OSM session on Sunday.

Which reminds me I need to organise that...

-Louisa