The OSM South East London mapping party will aim to fill in the blanks in the OSM map of the area. Greenwhich, Lewisham and Blackheath are all well covered by Yahoo!’s aerial imagery, so lots of roads have been filled in but most of them don’t have a name and there’s lots of mistakes with junctions not joining up properly and so on. We’ll also be collecting point-of-interest data; schools, hospitals, shops, pubs and restaurants all make OSM’s map richer and more useful.
There’s more details on the OSM Wiki. As always, OSM Mapping Parties are open to everyone - if you are interested, get in touch or add your name to the wiki.
To accompany the slides, here’s a condensed version:
Some guys with GPS units on vans donated their traces to some otherguys 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.
On the 1st and 2nd September, the Isle of Man is going to be hosting its first OpenStreetMap mapping party, organised by Dan Karran, who’s been blogging quite a bit about the event. Dan’s latest post highlights the impact that OpenStreetMap maps of the Isle of Man can have. Right now, the best map of the Isle Of Man that you can find on the internet is OpenStreetMap’s. Its not complete yet, but it could be with a couple of days of effort.
You can find more details about the weekend on the OpenStreetMap wiki. If you are interested in joining in the mapping, get in touch with Dan, or me.
There’s a shed load of awesome events coming up in the next few weeks.
This Saturday 11th August is the OpenSreetMap Third anniversary party, which is happening at 3pm at The Anchor pub, near London Bridge station. Click here for a map.
Next up, the 3rd - 6th September sees the 43d annual Society of CartographersSummer School, which is being held in Portsmouth, UK. The summer school has a programme packed full of all things cartographic, with OSM represented by Artem and me, who are talking on Thursday 6th in the ‘Community Mapping’ session.
Also on the horizon are the Isle of Man Mapping Party - OSM’s first mapping party on the island on the 1st September, and then FOSS4G and the Victoria Mapping Party - more to come on both the Isle of Man and Victoria mapping parties in the next few days.
