We’ve got quite a range of London events upcoming in various stages of planning:

TONIGHT! - Join us in The Parcel Yard pub here in the new bit of Kings Cross station from 7pm for our regular London winter pub meet-up

Thu 22nd - geomob - They’ve just announced the line-up. Six different geo-presentations followed by pub. This is always a fun geo crowd, and usually a fair few OpenStreetMappers in attendance.

Sat 24th / Sun 25th - London branch of Operation Cowboy - This one is being organised by Tom Morris. He’s yet to confirm the venue, but has a plan. I hope this can be a good “training” event, at which people can go and learn or share tips about OpenStreetMap editing (That should be the focus I think. Not so sure about the “cowboy” ideas) But it’s not my event! Somebody else is organising something. Hurray! For that reason alone, I’d encourage everyone to support it. It will need experienced mappers and of course lots of inexperienced mappers to sign up to it. Tom has been promoting it to the wikipedians, but there’s probably quite a few other people who have been waiting for a non-pub related non-hacking mapping related OpenStreetMap event. How to get the word out to those people? I’ve pondered training kind of event formats for a long time. Hope it works well.

Sat 1st & Sun 2nd December - Hack Weekend. The dates are not necessarily set yet, but this seems like the most likely weekend. It means it’ll clash with Sanitation Hackathon (a humanitarian tech event), but it’s the best weekend for OpenStreetMap hacker availability. If you’re within range of London and interested in the technical side of OpenStreetMap (“internal” development or just using OSM data) then keep this weekend free. More details to come very soon hopefully.

And finally the Christmas Party 2012. We’ve got a wiki page so far at least. We should probably pick a date.

Phew! So thats the upcoming stuff.

The last London winter pub meet-up was at the Blue Posts. We had a small gathering but with a couple of new folks.

Aimee was along to learn about OSM and get ideas for possible projects. She’s looking to do something map related for her MSC. We discussed “circular routing”, choosing a route to go on a circular cycle/walk taking in some sights before looping back. The cyclestreets guys have done some work along these lines.

We also had Jack along. He was investigating the various ins and outs of running your own tile server (The kind of things introduced here on switch2osm). Andy was able to give him plenty of pointers. In particular he was asking about memory and other requirements when renting virtual machines, which is something Andy knows all about from running OpenCycleMap and transport map.

Also here’s Andy with a banana:

We went for burritos later, and I forgot my bank card behind the bar, so we just had to go back and have more beers after that. No choice!

So tonight we’ll be at the pub again. All the details on the wiki. We’ll be in the Parcel Yard pub in the new bit of Kings Cross station. Something a bit different. Easy access for people entering/leaving London on the train! Come join us at this and/or any of the other events mentioned above.