Party Time! Good and bad ways to run OpenStreetMap mapping parties

Editor's Notes

• #2: This is a talk about mapping parties with some thoughts and experience from my perspective as the organiser of Lonon Mapping parties
• #3: But the more I thought about, the more I realise that the way I run mapping parties isn't perfect. I should perhaps have called this talk “good and bad ways that Harry runs mapping parties”
• #4: So why do we run mapping parties? That's a boring slide
• #5: We run mapping parties because it's fun. This applies to many aspects of OpenStreetMap, but it's particularly important to remember the fun aspect when organising mapping parties. We shouldn't take things too seriously
• #6: We've had a lot of events in London. 67 meet-ups by my count. 7 hack events, either hack days or hack weekends, where we bring along a laptop and do technical work on OpenStreetMap. And of that total, about 43 mapping events where we go out and do some mapping.
• #7: The reson there has been so many is because we do what's called a “Mapping Party Marathon”. This is something Shaun McDonald set up. Basically we go out after work on a week-day evening, and just do a short bit of mapping before going to the pub
• #8: So a lot of mapping parties. A lot of “cake diagrams”. I'm going to talk a little bit about cake diagrams
• #9: This, I believe, was the first ever OpenStreetMap cake diagram. At the “Mapchester” event in Manchester back in 2006. The city was split into sectors, with a diagram alongside explaining numbering. As you can see it actually looks a bit like a cake cut into slices.
• #10: Since then we've used cake diagrams a lot, and we've seen an sort of artistic progression. These are some early London cake diagrams. Experimenting with different colours. The green lines didn't work well. They dont stant out against the trunk roads which are also green
• #11: This is the style I have settled upon. I find blue lines seem to stand out well. So you can see the idea. We split up and area of a map into numbered slices. When people sign up they choose a slice of the cake to map
• #12: These are some more recent cake diagrams. You can see we've gone for some more crazy shapes. When we're looking at the tedious details of mapping in central london we create long stripes for highstreets where there's lots of POI data to gather. You can also see a gap in the buildings on this map. The cake diagram is positioned over this gap in the building coverage
• #13: Before you can draw a cake diagram you have to chose a place to map. The NoNames map was a very useful tool for this. In cities like Sau Paulo it's still very useful. It shows areas where there has been lots of Yahoo sketching, but we dont have the streetnames. This is screenshot of London in 2008. These days the NoNames map is less useful. All the streets have names except a long way out in the outskirts
• #14: So there's lots of juicy mapping to do out in the outskirts, where we can gather more useful data, and this is more fun, except it's more difficult to get to. If you have a mapping party in the city centre, more people come along and socialise, and this is more fun. Sometimes we have to strike a balance
• #19: These are some blob diagrams I drew to illustrate a particular problem. An itch which I wanted to scratch. The building outlines coverage in London is a bit patchy, and this is rather ugly. So this is a bit like coordination to gather a particular type of data, but in general it doesn't work so well actually. People dont like to be told what to do. Everyone has their own type of mapping they find fun, so you have to allow people to do that. Having fun is the most important thing.
• #20: After picking a location for a mapping party you have to pick up. You don't necessarily need a particularly nice pub. A modern pub can be quite good because you need somewhere with space. Somewhere that isn't too loud.
• #21: I generally use the wiki as the homepage of the event. This is something which I know some people find a bit alien. Create your own page describing your event. We tend to recycle one wiki page because it's such a regular event, but if your running a mapping party generally you'll want to create a page about it. Creating pages doesn't cost us anything. Use it to describe the event, and venue etc. Link to it from the city/country pages which you can find under the “mapping projects” wiki page. Once it's all set up. Link to it from the “current events” on the Main Page. Afterwards it's important to do a bit of clean up. Label the page itself as a past event. On the city country page, remove the links or label them as past events. Because there's nothing worse than coming to a page which talks about an event as if it is upcoming, when in fact it has passed. It makes it look like the community is dead. Afterwards you can also use your event page as a place to link to photos & blog posts.
• #22: I take a lot of photos. Lots of photos of the inside of pubs. I also try to blog about each event. This is something I started doing because I realised that we have some really interesting discussions. Almost like a mini SOTM every time we meet-up. I wanted to share these with the rest of the community. I also wanted to prompt other people to run mapping parties, by showing what we're up to in London.
• #23: So I've talked about several things I do to set up a mapping party every two weeks. If you imagine these things each taking 10 minutes (and the blogging takes a lot longer than that) then it adds up to a considerable amount of my time. Having said that, I've become rather good at each of these steps so I have become quite streamlined at it.
• #24: But I'm very conscious that there's lots more things I could do. I haven't been very good at contacting press or local communities. In general we've been quite bad at attracting newbies, and as a result we dont really do things like bringing along GPSes or laptops to train people.
• #25: Press is important. This is a slide from a presentation at State of the Map 2008. The state of germany. It shows traffic spikes on OpenStreetMap.de after mentions in the press. These are often in relation to specific mapping party events. http://svn.openstreetmap.org/misc/lectures/2008/sotm2008-state-of-germany-jochen-topf.odp
• #26: OpenStreetMap.de is a nice website actually. As you can see the front page shows a map showing local groups. These include links to group mailing lists and event lists. In general the german “stammtisch” or “Mappertreffen” are still going very well. A lot of them are meeting every month. They're obviously doing something right.
• #27: While we're talking about press I should mention the Atlanta Citywide Mapathon. They did very good job of drumming up a lot of press attention, and got a lot people coming along. This was featured on Fox News Atlanta including an excellent interview with Thea Clay who is speaking next.
• #28: This time last year CloudMade had a lot of mapping ambassadors. No longer unfortunately. This was a rather brute force approach to stimulating mapping communities. Actually hiring people and flying the around to run mapping parties. But its interesting to think about how companies might fund mapping activities. They had a tough time of it in the U.S. though I think. It's not the same as mapping in Europe. The imports distract from the task and the data can make it harder for newbies to learn. The cities are more spaced out, and maybe they're just not as alcoholic as Europeans
• #29: So I could have talked about lots of other places around the world. Lots of interesting things happening, and I appreciate that my London experiences wont necessary be applicable elsewhere, there's lots of differences. And I'm not just talking about differences between London and the developing world. There are big differences between London and elsewhere in the UK, particul arly the pool of OSMers available to come to events. Globe image produced by Frederick Ramm using KDE Marble http://svn.openstreetmap.org/misc/pr_material/german_flyer_2010_04/
• #30: So in conclusion there is no ”best” way to to run a mapping party. You'll need to find a format that works for you. But if you do want to run a mapping party in your part of the world, I'd encourage you to give it a try. It's a lot of fun. If there's any way you think I can help with organising let me know, or if you have suggestions to improve the mapping parties in London, drop me a line. These are my contact details. http://harrywood.co.uk mail at harrywood.co.uk @harry_wood and @OSMLondon on twitter