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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