On Tuesday we had a London pub meet-up. We are still doing this every couple of months. I stopped writing diary entries about them, but for some reason (for your enjoyment!) I’ve decided to write about this one. So here goes:

We were at the Jack Horner Pub. It’s becoming the default choice in this bit of London where previously I would’ve chosen the Blue Posts (Sam Smiths pub. I still quite like them but there are reasons not to). Meanwhile Fullers make it quite easy to book a table on their website(s), so in uncharacteristically organised fashion, I booked table! but characteristically I arrived quite late. I only booked for 8 people, and that turned out to be about right on this occasion. A small intimate gathering.

We had along Json Singh from india, who just moved to London. I like the way he’s named himself after a file format (I was forgetting to ask him about that). So we talked to him about the state of mapping in India. It sounds like it’s progressing well with lively communities in the cities, although sometimes struggling to build formal organisations, partly because it’s a little bit illegal there, so has to remain a bit underground. That’s mostly because of tensions around showing of borders. I wonder whether vector tiles will soon allow us to do the same slight-of-hand trick that other map providers do, showing different border positions depending on your IP address location. It’s kind of comical how well that trick seems to work to take the heat off. Another thing which is daft, is that there’s no official openly published data on the border position which officially must be shown on maps of india. That would be a basic way of helping assert a particular desired border position. But no.

We talked about some mapping apps. Derick did a little demo of everydoor, including how to add a new POI. I’ve never done that. Personally I didn’t really adopt everydoor yet. Initially I imagined it didn’t add much value for experienced mappers who know how to use the Vespucci app. But others started raving about it. I think I’m starting to get why. A while ago I installed the OSMfocus android app, and recently found myself using that while looking along dense shopping street a bit like in this video. To my surprise I realised that this was better for checking shops in maintenance-mode. Where previously I was fiddling around with Vespucci, going in and out of each POIs/shop outline to check the tags on it. The OSMFocus app has a “show all the data, all at once” approach. It has crosshairs in the middle of the screen, and the data gets listed which is nearest to that. Everydoor is the same! And it looks like Vespucci recently redesigned the default interface to have an everydoor-like list. In a way though OSMfocus takes the idea to the logical extreme. It’s kind of crude, but it uses a rainbow of colour and even connecting lines (easier than numbers) to help you tell which list of tags is for which shop.

In the pub I was floating the idea of a “Notathon” mapping party. I’ve been looking at notes (Notes) in central London recently. Obviously there’s a lot of them (map) (Did anyone make a map that show’s more than 1000 on the screen at once?), but the thing I find interesting, is that the notes which remain open have been weeded out pretty well. The spam gets removed. The nonsensical ones get removed. The ones which can be resolved by knowing how to edit, or by doing a bit of research, tend to get resolved, and so actually what we’re left with is something we need to survey. It’s surprisingly good quality information in a way. Or so my argument went. Derick was not convinced. In the pub we used my Notes KML downloader tool for OrganicMaps to take a look at notes near where he lives in Kilburn. I think this weeding out of useless notes hasn’t been as thorough outside the centre, because he did find some cruft, although it was mostly stuff that he was irritated by because he had re-mapped the thing himself already (So the note was not wrong, but not up-to-date with local mapping he was already on top of). But that’s easy for him to fix quickly, and satisfying no? Derick was not convinced, but personally I’ve been looking for a long time at pushing back my “notes free radius” from where I live, and I think we need to start doing this around the pubs we drink in. Or maybe a good old cake diagram for a bigger note fixing session!

I don’t have a date to announce just yet. If we decide on a notathon, or some other kind of event, I will put details on the London page and on OSMLondon mastodon.