[Talk-GB] Virtual OSM East Midlands / Nottingham meeting Tuesday 17th March

[SK53]

Thanks to everyone who turned up last night: we'll do the same thing again
next month on the 20th April at 19:30 <https://osmcal.org/event/611/>.

I thought I'd quickly summarise some(!) of the topics touched on last night:

* *Clean Air Zones*: Brian asked because Birmingham are in the process of
introducing one, and I notice the Bath one went live this morning. Brian's
question were: How routers manage such things? and could he get away with a
single area or does he need to connect every street entering the area to
the polygon? I vaguely recalled Robert Scott doing something with OSRM back
at Foss4g 2013 as part of a challenge to route avoiding polluted areas. A
quick scan of the topic on OSRM finds this Stack Exchange question & a link
to a pull request <https://github.com/Project-OSRM/osrm-backend/pull/4315>
on Github, whereas for Graphhopper there is apparently
<https://discuss.graphhopper.com/t/avoid-areas-by-type/5768> no direct
support at present. However the response on the last topic suggests that
pre-processing of data with LUA allows the additional constraints on each
road within the area to be added at that step. The issue I'm not sure about
is polygon assembly from OSM ways: Andy uses a Welsh language polygon in
his Useful Map LUA to choose which name to render, but this is precomputed
geojson IIRC.
* *Locked Gates* (not "Lock Gates" as I misheard returning from another
phone call). John Stanworth has been mapping these gates (which largely are
ones which do not provide access to public or private highways and would
like them rendered differently on Andy Townsend's Useful Map. I remarked
that I would like a somewhat more standardised way of indicating different
gates on PRoW, the width tag may do much of the work (note to self: find
out sandard dimension of farm gates).
* *OSM Calendar*. This is newish software which is now used on the OSM Wiki
and weeklyOSM to show upcoming OSM events. It make life easier for meeting
organisers by providing a single place to add information about an event,
but it also provides a range of other features
<https://osmcal.org/documentation/> (such as: country level RSS feeds,
signing-up for a meeting). It lacks a page on the wiki which would probably
help generate greater awareness across OSM communities.
* *Irish St Patrick's day project*. Brian asked if anyone was planning to
contribute. I said I had no plans but have been sporadically adding
buildings in Inishowen (Co. Donegal) townland by townland. A couple of
others said they may contribute.
* *Solar Panels*. Brian wondered why solar panel progress had slowed to a
standstill. He rightly suspected that I hadn't been doing many recently.
This was partly because I had other things to do in the run upto Christmas,
but also because Gregory's change in calculating completion means I really
need to revisit some older mapped panels and terrace underlying buildings.
In the Wirral I've been doing more detailed searching to find a relatively
small number of panels, but increase % completion rate in specific LSOAs.
This is much less effective than searching areas with small percentages of
panels mapped. As we have recently passed the 2nd anniversary of Jack's
query about mapping panels I stated I had been wondering about a different
kind of project for the 3rd year of solar panel mapping. One idea would be
to try and get all of the Welsh LAs up to a high level of completion (say
80%), because then we could say we had solar power for an entire country
mapped. Brian queried whether mapping in rural areas might be difficult,
but I said my technique of clustering OS Local buildings gave a much
reduced set of target areas which can easily be incorporated into JOSM or
Potlatch task managers (or potentially MapRoulette). I pointed out that I'd
had good experiences in rural Devon (and I also did a trial in Powys). The
other solar panel issue is whether anyone is using our data for
identification of panels using machine learning. There may be issues with
the ability to use imagery displayed in editors. I remarked that recent
availability of imagery from Swisstopo & the French IGN may make those
countries more suitable candidates for machine learning techniques. Kanton
Zurich, for instance, has high-quality 10cm imagery which is open data. I
don't know if Dan & co., have any plans in this respect, but again, it
would be nice to see something during year 3 of the project.
* *FHRS Data*. Dave Venables has been tracking FHRS changes in the past
year over parts of Notts & Derbys. Turnover in FHRS Ids has been very low,
so once lockdowns ease fully one might expect a massive increase as
businesses which are, in practice, no longer viable, actually fold. Apart
from their utility for updating OSM, this also means that keeping a history
of FHRS data may provide useful insights into the impact of covid-19 on UK
retail (Peter Reed showed ages ago that FHRS covers around 50% of all
retail outlets).

We also discussed *future meeting*s. Finding suitable pubs in the area with
decent sized beer gardens might be an issue (particularly as one suggestion
in Derby may not re-open). It is likely when & if we restart meetings they
will be in Derby as for most of us that minimises time on public transport,
or we'll meet during the day local to me. Exactly what we'll do will depend
on progress with rates of infection, vaccination & lockdown rules. My
current feel is that May is a bit unlikely, but June looks more promising
(not least because all of the usual attendees will have had at least one
dose of a vaccine by then).

Cheers,

Jerry

On Tue, 16 Mar 2021 at 14:52, SK53 <sk53.osm at gmail.com> wrote:

> A quick bit about BigBlueButton before tonight:
>
> * You need to sign-up with an email & password
> * A confirmatory email is sent
> * Meeting starts automatically (when I join) if you are signed in on the
> page in the link
> * My setup joins with microphone only & muted, you need to also join with
> video (it will request permission to access devices). There is an echo test
> stage too
> * Keyboard shortcuts are shown from the menu in top-right corner (they are
> a little long-winded Alt-Shift-M for toggling mute, so buttons on-screen
> may be better)
> * There is both a chat channel & a note channel (etherpad) for
> collaborative working
>
> Jerry
>
> On Mon, 15 Mar 2021 at 11:04, SK53 <sk53.osm at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Oops, I did mean tomorrow 16th, Tuesday.
>>
>> Jerry
>>
>> On Mon, 15 Mar 2021, 10:58 John Baker, <rovastar at hotmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> The 17th is a Wednesday.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Is it the 16th a Tuesday / Tomorrow
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Sent from Mail <https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=550986> for
>>> Windows 10
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> *From: *SK53 <sk53.osm at gmail.com>
>>> *Sent: *Monday, March 15, 2021 6:56 AM
>>> *To: *Talk-GB at openstreetmap.org <talk-gb at openstreetmap.org>
>>> *Subject: *Virtual OSM East Midlands / Nottingham meeting Tuesday 17th
>>> March
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> I've scheduled a BigBlueButton virtual room
>>> https://osmvideo.cloud68.co/user/sk5-gma-onp-gzw for an on-line OSM
>>> meeting in lieu of our monthly pub meetings which have been suspended for
>>> the last year.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> As this is virtual if anyone fancy joining us, please do.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Big Blue Button is similar to Zoom, although no doubt has it's own UI
>>> peculiarities. Users are muted on joining. The service is provided by OSMF.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Date: tomorrow 17th March Time: 19:30 (by request before evenings get
>>> much lighter).
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> I'll update the wiki later today.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Jerry
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
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