The market is a place I may not have discovered had it not been a plea from Pete Gravell for someone with OpenStreetMap experience to host a small stall to promote the project. Pete was organising an Open Sourcery event as part of Spacemakers organisation that is trying to re-invigorate the market. Spacemakers are allowed to use some of the empty units to host weird, wonderful, arty things that encourage people to come and see what's going on. Which has the hopeful knock-on effect of businesses wanting to rent units in the market because of the increased foot-fall.
Along with Simon, I went along to try and get more out about OSM and crucially more geo-information for OSM.
Brixton like most of London is well mapped however as this was likely done from aerial imagery, and a few people on the ground there is not much local information about playgrounds, pubs restaurants and local businesses. Even the Market itself was not on the map! Which Simon quickly sorted out.
To get local POIs we had the idea of having a large map that people could write on (similar to Walking Papers) and me or Simon could add the data into the database ourselves. This morphed into using pins and wool, and extra blank pieces of paper either side because there wasn't much space on the map for writing descriptions
Starting at 10:00 I was worried that people would walk past and not be confident enough to add their local knowledge to the map, however the free-minded/spirited people of the market seemed to be used to being asked to do slightly crazy things in Brixton Village Market. Once people clicked that their favourite park, cafe or restaurant was going to be on a public map they were very enthusiastic although I'm not quite sure I got across to everybody what OSM was about.
Halfway through the day - Me in my OSM Surveyors Hi-Vis jacket trying to explain OSM to general public. Image courtesy of Pete Gravell©.
Once a few things were added the visual attraction of pins and coloured wool meant that more people stopped to have a look and then got caught to adding more information. One woman even came back 5 times (probably more) trying to add information and only on the 5th time did she have a cafe that had not already been added!
The map at the end of the day.
By the end of the day we had at least an extra 30 POIs on the map and with all the which has been left in the Market because I couldn't bear to tear it apart to take home. Now that the market has been added to the map I'd like to go back and add in all the little businesses in the units. The market changes from week-to-week, month-to-month, year-to-year and OSM is probably the only project that could even come close to coming up to date.
I've never taken part in an OSM event like this before. I have been to mapping parties but they are always with people who understand the project and we usually map a place that is already blank. So we are trying to add in the roads and road names, and hoping someone else will add in POIs. Seeing as it didn't cost much to make the map, and it's a very intuitive way of adding information I think it should become a part of OSM outreach activities.
The map was using Mapgen.pl (originally designed to be a quick and easy way to generate maps for emergency response in Haiti) and sent it to the printers. Total time between thinking of the idea and having a map was less than 24hrs! The map also "only" cost ~£16, which for a 4 hour print time, one off colour printing on very high quality A1 paper I thought was quite reasonable.
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West Bromwich Mapping Party - This Weekend.
Birmingham is done. What next? West Bromwich and the Black Country of course!
To help us on our way a Cloudmade sponsored mapping party is happening at The Public, map(Very Rough!) in West Bromwich centre this weekend, 4th and 5th April.
(If you look at the map link given, you can see that West Brom town centre is very poorly mapped. That will have to change!)
This mapping party is welcoming anyone and everyone to help us. Walkers, pensioners, students and families! Remember the first rule of OpenStreetMap is to "Have fun!". If you'd like to take part just come along, preferably with a pen and paper. There are GPS devices available for loan, and if you have your own even better. A digital camera or Dictaphone are also very useful.
The OSM Midlands User Group has set themselves the challenge of mapping the West Bromwich and Black Country area before Christmas 2009.
Andy Robinson (Blackadder) has already divided up the region and produced the cake[1]. There is a massive total of 284 segments, of which 17 have been done by Andy and Brian Prangle.
To complete the map by Christmas we need to do about 7 segments a week! And that is more than manageable I believe. And the mapping party will get us off to a good start.
See you there!
[1] A cake in OSM is not edible. It is a map of the region that has been divided up using easily distinguishable landmarks, such as main roads, rivers, canals, motorways etc. This means that a coordinated attempt can be taken to map an area, without the likely hood of repeated effort. Plus they look pretty cool.
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I've been a bit rubbish lately and have not said anything about the Birmingham Hack Space.
We've had our first organisation meeting at the Bull Inn. Which I turned up 2 and a half hours late to, but everyone else seemed happy with how the meeting went. The minutes for it are here.
Since then we had our first actual hacking meeting, which Nikki Peugh hosted. She kindly lent us the use of her flat, she provided wifi, we provided food. That was the deal.
There were four of us in attendance, Nikki, Antonio (hellocatfood), Charlie and myself.
Antonio and Charlie concerned themselves with Processing (Processing is a scripting language for the Computer Science impaird, ie graphic artists and normal people) and Python ( a programming language for the everything impaired, ie me).
Nikki and I tried to get the counting iguanas to RFID system she had made to work. Iguanas with a fetching RFID badge, would walk past a reader and this would be tallied. An officious Walrus would come along and check this number, and publish it to Twitter. Nikki had got the code from a friend, and had it working on one computer. However when transferred to the computer doing the work, it stopped. The problem (after a couple of hours fiddling) was found to be in how Windows deals with spaces in pathnames. But we got it working, and now Nikki and her Walrus can count Iguanas to the hearts content.
The next hacking meeting is going to be at Linux Emporium. John Pinner has kindly let us use his company offices. There is a poll to show your support for a particular day. The poll will be closed on the 23rd March, so be quick!
See you then!
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The 3rd and final day of the Birmingham Bug Jam, and it was much quieter this time around. Myself, Quentin, John Pinner and Chris "Baggers" were the only ones here to start. Chris was hardcore and actually spent the night in Linux Emporium though I don't know if he actually got any bugs triaged. Hellocatfood, from IRC, joined us later in the afternoon and got he managed to get a few hours of bug triaging in.
We set up the webcam stream so that the bug hunters in London could interact with us, and kudos to them (and Tim Williams) for setting up another webcam stream from London. We had two-way communication which really added to the atmosphere, and made it feel more of a global event. Having comments being shouted from London, and us laughing back made us really feel that we were part of a larger group, working together to the same ends. There were also others that joined in from home via the webcam and IRC.
Food wise, we had more tasty food this time a huge pizza that had to be halved so it fitted in the oven, burgers, and chocolate cake. Washed down by beers provided by Chris.
Chris got distracted again and started to juggle some penguins.
I felt that I got more bug triaging done today then yesterday. I felt more confident posting comments and changing status'.
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It's Saturday and we're hunting bugs in Birmingham! The day kicked off around 10 O'Clock at Linux Emporium (facilities kindly provided by John Pinner) with everyone getting stuck into bugs on Launchpad. Mez gave a quick how-to on bug triaging to a few of us. Unfortunately it seemed that everyone else on the interest was being just as enthusiastic and the Launchpad servers couldn't handle the load. The Canonical monkeys got it sorted eventually so we got back to bug zapping.
Tim Williams of Autotrain and SBLug set up the room with a streaming webcam, so that the whole world can watch - and listen! - to our bug hunting. This essentially meant we spent a good while irritating the London Bug Jammers by eating tasty lasagne, chocolate cake, drinking beer and juggling penguins.
I only managed to triage about 9 bugs today, it's still very much early days for me but I still think I helped. Most of the triaging I did was to file the bugs against what I thought was the correct package, and changing the status, asking for more info. Quentin and Nick were able to actually have a more in-depth stab at the bugs, because we had a wide variety available in the Linux Emporiums office, reporting back more specific information that should hopefully help developers when they come to fix the bugs.
Mez and Zeth also spent a bit of time interviewing the bug jammers for a podcast they are preparing to release.
Later in the day we had a surprise visit from Henrik Omma who helped me understand a little more about Launchpad, and helped me by setting a few bugs to "wishlist".
Hopefully tomorrow I will be more confident with setting bug status, and asking for more information.
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