OMB

Incase you missed the talk, here are the slides:

To accompany the slides, here’s a condensed version:

Some guys with GPS units on vans donated their traces to some other guys who made a collaborative map. This was cool, so lots of people joined in, collecting lots of traces, making nice maps and writing software tools to edit the map. The project is now growing very quickly and a Foundation has been set up, which does things like fundraising and organising conferences.

The most valuable thing to OSM are the people. But people are often disparate and hard to organise. For OSM to work the people need to be motivated by incentives other than money. The people won’t do stuff unless its fun, they trust the organisation and they see the results of the hard work.

Geo-data in the UK is very good, but very expensive and is sold by the Ordnance Survey. OSM’s data is not as good as the OS’s data, but its free. As OSM’s data gets better, the OS’s data will get cheaper. When OSM’s data is good enough for 80% of uses, proprietary vendors will be forced to compete on a margin of 20% of use cases. This will lead to more innovations in the mapping industry and more price cuts.

Some people say that OSM’s data is crap. Others just get on with making free maps.

Teleatlas have the van and now OSM have the scooter:

Scooter mapping has a lot of potential - you are able to rapidly stop and start, scooters have a small turning circle, you can take voice notes, easily pull out a camera and even stop to make notes. Efficiency compared to cycling is pretty impressive:

Saturday - by bicycle

nick_am_traces.gpx
av speed: 6.03 km/h
distance: 25.56 km
time: 04:14


Sunday - by scooter

nick_am_sunday_trace.gpx
av speed: 16.86 km/h
distance: 28.32 km
time: 01:40


The average speed is so low on the Saturday morning because of the stopping time - I stopped for a coffee half way through the morning and left the GPS running. I decided not to adjust for my stopping time though, as the coffee break time was time I could have been mapping had I not been nackered.

There’s only a few weeks to go until FOSS4G 2007 and OpenStreetMap’s Victoria (Canada) mapping party. Some important dates are:

OSM Mapping in Victoria - ‘Map as a party’

If you haven’t been to an OSM mapping party before, this is you opportunity to find out what open mapping is all about. Mapping parties began with the 2006 Isle of Wight workshop, when 30 OSM volunteers from across Europe descended on the Isle of Wight with the ambitious aim of mapping all of the island’s roads and footpaths in one weekend. 48 hours later, we had a pretty good free map of the island, and thanks to the dedication of local OSM volunteers, the map was soon completed.

The Isle of Wight party set the standard for OSM mapping parties and whilst there are no hard and fast rules about how to have a mapping party, we nearly always follow a similar plan.

Day 1 AM - Meet up in a local coffee shop/community centre (hopefully with WiFi), meet the mappers, decide which areas we will each be mapping, head out to map.

Day 1 Lunch - Meet up at a local pub/cafe, get some lunch, take a look at the mornings traces.

Day 1 PM - Head back out for an afternoon’s mapping.

Day 1 - Evening - Meet up at a local pub, before heading out to a restaurant.

Day 2 - Repeat Day 1

The emphasis really is on inclusiveness and having fun. Anyone who is interested in mapping, GIS, OpenSource, GPS and so on is welcome to come along to the party. OSM have a load of GPS units that we can lend out to people for the day and we will give full training - so even if you have never used a GPS before, you’ll be mapping in no time and once you start you’ll find it hard to stop. There are no rigid rules - you don’t have to map the way I think you should (in-fact one of the great things about mapping parties is hearing about other people’s mapping techniques) and you don’t have to map a particular neighborhood - its your free time that you are giving to OSM, so its up to you what you do with it.

OSM at FOSS4G

There’ll be a few OSMrs at FOSS4G - Mikel, Andrew and Corey will all be in attendance. I’m planning on doing some informal mapping on Monday 24th, so if you are interested in joining in, get in touch. Friday’s Code Sprint could also provide a good opportunity for some OSM hacking - it would be especially cool to talk to some other FOSS4G developers about integrating OSM data and software with with other FOSS tools - why include a shapefile of OSM data in the QGIS binaries for example?. There’s also the BOF sessions that could provide great opportunities.

Meet the mappers

So there’s a few ideas - if you want to meet up to talk about OSM, free data or anything else during the week in Victoria, drop me an email. If you wanted to attend but can’t make it, keep tuned to OMB and OpenGeoData - where I’ll be blogging more about the mapping party and the conference.