[OSM-talk] London Mapping Party - reflections

[Steve Chilton]

From where I am sitting the London Mapping event was a great success - loads of people (Sat pic on wiki), plenty of mapping done and good fun too.
Formally, can I ask anyone that attended to annotate the table on the wiki page with as much detail of what coverage you achieved in which sector, and also to do edits and uploading of new data as soon as reasonably possible.
It was great for me, living in London and seeing places I had never seen before. The contrast between Hatton Gardens (wall to wall jewellers shops) and the adjacent rather forlorn streets was certainly weird. In mapping terms the many courts, yards, passages, pedestrianised half/streets etc were all a bit of an eye opener and certainly a challenge to align and tag (for instance not necessarily being identifiable on the excellent Yahoo imagery). I was also unaware that such large swathes of Lincoln's Inn Fields and Grays Inn were private and not accessible to general public - even the roads, footpaths and open spaces (come back in the week Sir!). Meeting other people from the project was a real plus, and good banter followed in the pub later on Saturday. That was the plus side. The low point for me was getting stuck in a lavatory cubicle in a Wetherspoons pub on Theobalds Road during the afternoon's mapping. I had gone in in a bit of a hurry and hadn't noted the pub's name. For a moment I thought I was going to have to dial 999 and ask police to come to an unnamed pub and get someone from pub to release me from the trap!
So, if you have ever remotely thought of attending a mapping party I would thoroughly recommend it. You meet people of similar (and disimilar) dispositions and get some real progress made on the project, plus you get the feel for an area that you may or may not know already. There are spring weekend ones upcoming (details on wiki) at Bristol, Birmingham, Sheffield, etc) and planned longer ones for the summer in such locations as the Lake District and the Black Forest, Germany.
So, finally a few thanks.
Thanks to SteveC for being the main organiser, to Multimap and Nestoria for their support, to NickB for finding us a food and drink venue Sat night (pity the George hasn't discovered what proportion of the population are vegetarians, but hey ho!), and to Dutch for the excellent animations of progress so far. And finally a callout to Jochen who had probably travelled furthest for the event - coming over from Germany.
We planned to map all of the existing central congestion charge area, and it looks like we may have just about achieved that, apart from maybe a couple of areas south of the river. Bizarely, we may have missed the very end of sector 6 (area between Aldwych and the Thames). If someone did it just shout. If not, and anyone from Multimap who was on weekend and is reading this perhaps you could nip out and map it - it is virtually opposite your offices!
Well done all, and hope to see you at a future event.
Cheers
STEVE