Yesterday’s Missing Maps party in London looked like it was going to be completely chaotic. Both Astrid (who organises the mapping parties) and I had been on holiday til the day before and the new MSF office (which we only moved into a little while ago) was only ready for us to move around about ten minutes before we started.

But, by 1820 (twenty minutes after start time) all that could be heard was the clicking of mice and the low level buzz of excited, whispered conversations…

How did it go so smoothly when the opposite was looming?

Chatting with Astrid later, we came to the following conclusions, which I want to share here…

Firstly, our Missing Maps community in London is committed and engaged. Many people come back on a regular basis and friendships and sub-communities are forming. So cool to see groups forming around certain tasks, such as supporting Carmen, who is field mapping with the OSM Bangladesh guys or helping Rupert get the field paper data he and Kieran gathered with local mappers in Epworth, Zimbabwe on to OSM.

Secondly, we made the discovery that if you split people up by experience and by what they want to achieve (we had four rooms: iD for beginners, JOSM for beginners, experienced JOSMers and validators-in-training), the conversation flows, the people in each room are much more able to support each other and peer training really works.

Lastly, our HOTties from London (and nearby) are great. Each room had a HOTty in there, responsible for leading and advising. So, as soon as people turned up, they got comfortable, knew who to ask for help and could get rolling with no fuss at all. When we have everyone in one big room, it certainly looks more impressive, but people are less confident asking questions and HOTties often end up answering the same questions countless times.

Of course there are other reasons (the wifi didn’t crumble, the pizza turned up on time etc), but for those looking to put on large scale mapathons (about 70-80 people last night), I hope this helps…