London Silicon Roundabout meet-up

I went along to a “London Silicon Roundabout meet-up” last week. It’s a very dragons den style business pitching sort of event, both in the presentations later on, and in the kind of conversations people were having while socialising beforehand. I did my best to describe placr.co.uk to a few people, but I shall have to polish my pitch a little. The various projects we have on the go at the moment, make for a rather confusing story. I probably should’ve stuck to describing our iPhone app ‘UK TravelOptions’.

After the socialising with beers on the roof terrace, there was a more formal sit-down presentation session. I think the presenters were told they had five minutes and then given 15/20 minutes. ~100 people in the audience. Some were real investors. Many, like me, were just enjoying playing the role, imagining ourselves to be investors. Lots of chin scratching and awkward questions being asked. These were the presentations and some of my thoughts on them:


blottr.com – User generated news site a.k.a. citizen journalism. Well presented. They have algorithms for deciding if content is unconfirmed vs credible (which he over-egged the sophistication of). Also rating mood of an article on a percentage level. This idea reminded me a lot of zapidonia.com (ancient history). But I mainly found it interesting that they’d gone for localised city-based news sites. He didn’t really explain why.

kliqed.com – iPhone app for meeting up with friends. Meetings are auto-arranged matching by location (a geo app!) and also by your free time calendar. They’re building their own more exclusive friends network. Just your close friends, rather than hooking into twitter and facebook networks. It was a slick presentation, but it’s doomed to fail. There’s a huge critical mass challenge with that idea, worse, a “geo-critical-mass” challenge. This has killed many other “find friends nearby” app ideas which have gone before it.

freelancestudents.co.uk – I wanted this to be a good pitch. The idea is obvious from the name, and it’s a good one. As a student I was bristling with untapped computer programming enthusiasm, and a need to earn some peanuts, but no obvious gateway into casual part-time skilled job. Companies (as far as I could tell at the time) were only looking for full time graduates. And yet since then I’ve come across countless situations where I’ve thought “surely we could hire a student to do this fun bit of website coding”. Sadly the pitch scored a big FAIL because he didn’t show the actual website! Also his claim of quality (of freelancers) was not backed up with a convincing explanation.

zuztertu.com – eductional mobile app. Presenting educational content and testing interfaces within a mobile app, but also a platform for creation of content. It was clear they’d engaged with school teachers and academics, and figured out clever ways of letting them, or persuading them, to do simple content authoring for mobile screens. This was my favourite talk. Education is a fun software genre. Mobile education is going to be big. I wonder if john mckerrel’s examtutor apps were one of the competitors they’d checked out. I’m sure my android app will be if I ever release it 🙂

Tag Bento – tagging of objects in photos. Didn’t really understand the idea of this one. Photos of products. e.g. make-up bag spread out on a table. These were ‘tagged’ with linkified areas of the photos taking you to sites for purchasing them. Users could create these object tagged product photos, but it wasn’t clear why.

“I’ll tell you where I am… I’m out”

Bus route rendering at RewiredState

I made a bus map.

bus map

Not just an image, but a dynamic “slippy map” rendered at several zoom levels.

This was my “hack” for the RewiredState, National Hack the Government Day”, a gathering of hackers who build something in a day, with the aim of tackling government/society problems, working with government data. Projects are presented at the end of the day.

I created the bus map by “rendering” OpenStreetMap data. By this I mean starting from raw map data, the underlying vector data, the coordinates and connections of every road etc, and creating raster images arranged in tiles at several zoom levels, for the map display linked above.

Clearly within the graphics routines this bright red routes data is drawn in a particular order, and in a sense it is laid on top of the map, but it’s important to realise the routes are baked into the raster images. This isn’t a javascript overlay. Rendering data in this way has advantages and disadvantages over javascript overlays. An advantage is that we can show all the bus routes of London when zoomed out, without crashing the browser. Other advantages are in the subtleties of how you can make the map look. I haven’t really demonstrated this very well here yet, but I hope to make some improvements. If you look closely some tube station labels are drawn over the routes, which at least shows it’s not an overlay. There are other (better) OpenStreetMap rendering examples elsewhere

bus map close-up

Getting the data

You can download raw OpenStreetMap vector data for the entire planet. In fact I took an england extract in PBF format offered up by geofabrik. From this I just chopped out the London area (this bounding box) using the tool “osmosis” with this command:

wget http://download.geofabrik.de/osm/europe/great_britain/england.osm.pbf

$OSMOSIS_HOME/bin/osmosis \
   --read-pbf ./england.osm.pbf \
   --bounding-box left=-0.543 right=0.337 top=51.719 bottom=51.253 idTrackerType=BitSet \
   --write-xml ./london.osm

Once I had london.osm, it was time to put this through the Mapnik rendering tool. Very broadly the steps were:

  • Install Mapnik. In fact this is several steps, but happily I already had it installed. The ‘Build your own OpenStreetMap Server’ tutorial by Richard Weait was useful for this
  • Load the data into postGIS with a command such as ./osm2pgsql -S default.style --slim -d gis ./london.osm
  • Edited ‘generate_image.py’ to render a single image in central london as a test
  • Edit ‘generate_tiles.py’ to specify the london bounding box and zoom levels. Initially I’ve rendered zoom levels 7 to 15.
  • Run ‘generate_tiles.py’ to create the tileset (png files in a directory structure)
  • Made a HTML file with the javascript to launch OpenLayers fullscreen pointing at these tiles (do ‘view source’ on the site to see the javascript for this)
  • Copied the stylesheet file ‘inc/layer-ferry-routes.xml.inc’ to make a new style layer for bus route relations (thanks to SK53 for suggesting this)
  • Reference the new layer in osm.xml, and ‘inc/layers.xml.inc’
  • Test using ‘generate_image.py’ before re-running ‘generate_tiles.py’ to re-render the tiles.
  • Added more rules for varying thicknesses and a TextSymbolizer for showing route labels

My busmap stylesheet so far: style.tar.gz

öpnvkarte

Among the list of rendering examples linked above, is the one called “öpnvkarte.de” which shows bus routes throughout europe. In fact this is one of the best examples of customised OpenStreetMap rendering. Really nice colour and style choices with subdued colours for the background features enhancing the bold transport lines very clearly. So bus route rendering has certainly already been done. What’s the point in my map then?

öpnvkarte is very german. It’s named after a german transport network. The map is quite literally centred on Germany, and you’ll have noticed it has an un-typeable german character in it’s URL (although Shaun has provided openbusmap.org as a more sensibly named proxy). Petty irritations perhaps. So what else?

As far as I’m aware öpnvkarte hasn’t been updated in a while, so by re-rendering today’s openstreetmap data, we can see how the community has progressed with adding more routes. I was slightly disappointed to find that there wasn’t much difference in London actually. Just one or two details. Compare here with here. But OpenStreetMap people tend to be motivated a lot by renderings and other uses of the data they’re gathering. If the bus map stops being updated, then people stop adding bus routes.

There are other things which are less than perfect about öpnvkarte. It’s not a worldwide rendered tileset. It went worldwide for a few weeks but the server didn’t manage to cope. (I know my map is obviously not competing very well. I just rendered tiles for London!)

Wordwide tile rendering and re-rendering of updates, are tricky technical challenges. Obviously the developer of öpnvkarte is under no obligation to do these things, it’s just a shame that he doesn’t. More of a shame is that he doesn’t (as far as I’m aware) share his stylesheet config files. Again he’s not obliged to do so, and given the amount of work he must have put into it, perhaps it’s understandable. But sharing stylesheets would allow people with hardware and tuning know-how to have a go at tackling these other hosting challenges.

So those are a few weak justifications for starting all over again and attempting to build a different bus map stylesheet. My mapnik config files are hopelessly rudimentary so far, but it’s a start. Mostly though, this is just another baby step in my slow climb up the Mapnik learning curve. I wrote a diary entries back in January about this, but until this weekend I hadn’t tried anything further.

RewiredState
It was good to get up and present this rendering idea at rewiredstate, to a bunch of hackers and data mashers who I think would find this sort of thing interesting to play with themselves. I know a lot of them will reach for the boring old google maps toolsets for their map mashing work, but hopefully I gave a hint at some of the raw power and rendering fun offered by OpenStreetMap. Perhaps I should have made this important point again though: You can just use the familiar google maps javascript API on top of OpenStreetMap basemaps!.

The important point I did remember to make in my 2 minute slot: Next weekend we’re having a London OpenStreetMap hack weekend. I must try to prepare this time!

Thanks to the hard working RewiredState organisers and their sponsors (wired uk, tso, dxw) for a great day, and for all the free penguin biscuits and beers in the pub afterwards.

UPDATE: New transport map from Andy Allan. My friend Andy is creator of OpenCycleMap and all round Mapnikmeister. Unveiled today (14th April), his transport map is auto-updated and rendered worldwide (how are your local buses looking?) with beautiful pale shaded background cartographic choices. I think we can safely say I’ve been outdone on this one 🙂

placr tube-radar

placr Tube Radar on an iPhoneHere’s something I’ve been working on at placr:

>>>> placr.mobi <<<

[Update:placr.mobi is a bit different these days, but the tube stuff is actually available at http://placr.mobi/timetable?u=uk%2Ftube ]

Have a play with it. The site is designed to work well on mobile screens. You can get to it by typing “tube-radar.com“. [update: These days that’s also something different. Sorry for the confusion]

The red and blue lines indicate tube performance in terms of “headway”. The time between trains. Closer to the centre means shorter headway (good!) further from the centre means… waiting around a while.

 

placr Tube Radar at London Bridge

You can compare the data over the past 24 hours (red) with the “normal” levels (blue) which are averaged over a longer time period, but at the same platform and same time of day. Hopefully this will give an indication of how good or bad or erratic your service is likely to be today.

If you’ve chatted to me about what I’ve been doing at placr, you’ll have noticed I’m fairly hopeless at describing it. So hopefully this will give you a better idea, although this is only part of part of what I’ve been doing. We decided it was time to bring some stuff to the public-facing surface from one of our projects. We’ve spent a while gathering and analysing performance metrics of the tube, and this is one kind of output we’re seeing. To get this out in time for the tube strike was a bit of a last-minute rush, so it may look rough around some of the edges, but here’s hoping some people will find it useful (or at least interesting) over the period of the tube strike.

Talks and thoughts on OpenStreetMap mapping parties


(photo Copyright All rights reserved by SINFOGEO)
A few weeks ago we had a big OpenStreetMap conference, the annual “State Of The Map”. This year it was in sun-baked Girona. “State Of The Map 2010 felt like a coming together of all my OpenStreetMap friends from around the world” Read my more detailed write up over on my user diary. There was a diverse variety of talk topics, from OpenStreetMap technical nitty-gritty, to big business GIS uses, to worldwide travels and humanitarian mapping. The full list of sessions is here. My talk this year was part of the “community track”.

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

UPDATE: Video of the talk is now available

I seem to have become the chief event organiser for OpenStreetMap in London, not because people massively admire the way I do it, but because it’s actually fair amount of effort, and I’m the one who got suckered into doing it. So this talk was mostly about my experiences of running these regular “mapping party” events, which we do every two weeks as a “mapping party marathon” (Sounds interesting? Check out when the next one is!)As I stressed in my talk, my approach is not ideal. There’s lots of things I don’t get around to doing. In particular I haven’t really tried to drum up press coverage of events. For one reason or another we never have very much luck at attracting new poeple. Although we try to be welcoming to new faces, it mostly ends up being a fun social meet-up where people know eachother. In the questions I was asked “what are my ideas for attracting new people?” to which I gave a hand-waivey response, but the truth is I don’t really know.


So I thought it counterpoised my talk quite nicely when Thea Clay got up and talked about outreach to non-technical communities and spoke about some of the successes she has had reaching out to local community groups and attracting new people to mapping parties in the U.S. This seems like a direction we need to go in, and I hope to find time to try this more in London. But then again…

Ultimately I think the most important message she had, was that OpenStreetMap is too difficult for non-techy people. They get the idea of creating open maps. They enjoy the outdoor aspect of data gathering, and they will have a lot of fun when you first take them out to do this, but the minute they sit down and take a look at our map editing tools “you can see the look on their faces change”.

Perhaps then the most important role of OpenStreetMap events, is to foster the existing OpenStreetMap community in an area. I would even go as far as saying that most outreach work at the moment should target boring old techy people and developers.

This is not the end game. We absolutely want to attract young people and old people, mothers and grandmothers, but getting techy people excited about OpenStreetMap is easier and actually far more effective than anything else at this stage. They’ll learn the tools quicker. But more importantly, these are the people who will go out and embed OpenStreetMap in their websites, taking it to new audiences, or if we’re really lucky they’ll go on to help solve the technical problems of OpenStreetMap and make the next useabilitiy break-throughs.

Obviously any publicity is good publicity. Any mapping party is a good mapping party, but I’m trying to consider where effort is best spent. Are we getting ahead of ourselves to try to engage with local community groups? Maybe I’m just working the geek angle, because that’s what I know best. As I said in my talk, press is important, and press (or PR?) is something OpenStreetMap needs to get better at.

Ruby code for converting to UK Ordnance Survey coordinate systems from WGS84?

Ruby code for converting to UK Ordnance Survey coordinate systems from WGS84? It’s one of those things I’d assumed would be a five minute search -> cut-n-paste job. But no. Well now you can cut & paste from here.

Using Proj4 and the proj4rb bindings

You can do all manner of coordinate projecting using Proj, and this is available within ruby code via proj4rb. To get set-up, install proj. On ubuntu you can do:

sudo apt-get install proj

download the proj4rb gem file (the ruby bindings), and install the gem:

sudo gem install proj4rb-0.3.1.gem

To use in a plain ruby script:

require 'rubygems'

require 'proj4'

To use in a rails app, add a line to your environment.rb file

config.gem "proj4rb", :lib => "proj4"

Probably all obvious to any pro-rubyist, but I got stuck at various stages of that. Anyway once you’re set up…

This code will do a conversion from WGS84 lat/lon to eastings and northings:

lon = -0.10322
lat = 51.52237

srcPoint = Proj4::Point.new(Math::PI * lon.to_f / 180,
                            Math::PI * lat.to_f / 180)

srcPrj  = Proj4::Projection.new("+proj=longlat +ellps=WGS84 +datum=WGS84 +no_defs")
destPrj = Proj4::Projection.new("+proj=tmerc +lat_0=49 +lon_0=-2 +k=0.9996012717 +x_0=400000 +y_0=-100000 "+
                                      "+ellps=airy +datum=OSGB36 +units=m +no_defs")

point = srcPrj.transform(destPrj, srcPoint)

puts "http://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=" + lat.to_s + "&mlon=" + lon.to_s + "&zoom=16"
puts "Converts to:";
puts "http://streetmap.co.uk/grid/" + point.x.round.to_s + "_" + point.y.round.to_s + "_106"

Originally I was trying just the ‘destPrj’ string, and calling the ‘forward’ method, but this seemed to be skipping the datum conversion, resulting in everything being 100m out. It seemed to be necessary to use the ‘srcPrj’ string and the ‘transform’ method, to get the datum conversion happening.

You can look up the mystical proj strings on spatialreference.org

(UPDATE)  If you’re interested in converting in the other direction, using the proj4 gem, see Peter Hicks blog: Converting OSGB36 (Eastings/Northings) to WGS84 (Longitude/Latitude) in Ruby

A pure ruby implementation

Like many naive developers who have gone before me, I started out thinking that these coordinate transformations should be acheivable with a few simple formulea, and was expecting to be able to copy & paste a block of ruby code from somewhere to do it without installing any gems.

I didn’t find any such code, but frustration with proj problems (before I got that working) led me to create a pure ruby solution, by porting this pure javascript code by Chris Veness into ruby. So there we go:

osgbconvert.rb – Conversion to Ordnance Survey coordinates in pure ruby

You can run it to see an example conversion with the output:

wgs84 lat:51.52237, wgs84 lon:-0.10322
http://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=51.52237&mlon=-0.10322&zoom=16
Converts to:osgb36 lat:51.5218609279112, osgb36 lon:-0.101610123646581

Converts to:easting:531691, northing:182090  As a grid ref:TQ31698209

http://streetmap.co.uk/grid/531691_182090_106

This includes ported code for Convert co-ordinates between WGS-84 and OSGB36 and ported code in one direction for OS Latitude/Longitude to OS National Grid (coordianate systems explained below) Also I haven’t faithfully stuck to what Chris’ functions return.

There is a bunch of maths, but it was quite a straightforward syntax conversion, and it comes in at about 150 lines of code. Somebody should do this for other languages. I’m sure other languages offer more beefy libraries equivalent to proj4. The main benefit of this is for quick copy & paste coding.

Mind you, if you are copying and pasting this, be sure to worry about the fact that it is LGPL licensed by Chris Veness [Update: It’s now shown under the more permissive CC-BY license on his website. Take your pick!]  For my part, you can credit me too if you like, but I don’t care.

I also came across another implementation, license unknown.

About Ordnance Survery coordinate systems

Chris Veness’s page is well linked because the code comes with a comprehensive description of what’s going on. However I misunderstood a few things even after reading it several times. Here’s my noddy guide to Ordnance Survey coordinate systems:

WGS84 is what I would call the “normal” latitude and longitude coordinate system. These days web developers passing around latitude and longitude values are normally using this. It’s what OpenStreetMap works with if you want to point to a location with a URL such as : http://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=51.52237&mlon=-0.10322&zoom=16 (the placr.co.uk office).

Ordnance Survey OSGB36 – Involves coordinates which are also called “latitude and longitude”. The numbers look very similar, and in fact if you get them confused and use one in place of the other, you’re generally only ~100 metres off. At this point I could mention “datums” and “ellipsoids”, but who cares? How do we fix it? With the above ruby code, use the function convertWGS84toOSGB36 (or convertWGS84toOSGB36 in the other direction)

Couple of formatting things to note: Both WGS84 and OSGB36 latitude & longitude values can be expressed in degrees and minutes rather than decimal, and with N S E W letters on the end. For example 51°31′20.53″N 000°06′11.60″W If longitude has a W on the end it would more “normally” be a negative number. The letters on the end do not make this an “Eastings/Northings” coordinate. That’s a different system…

Ordnance Survey National Grid Reference Eastings and Northings look totally different. For the placr office the easting is 531691. The northing is 182089. On these numbers the first digit is special. It’s identifying which “grid” square we are in, counting from zero. Everything in London is in grid square 5,1

National Grid References with letters are the older more human friendly version of that. So “TQ 3169 8208” is the equivalent. The 5 and 1 are removed, and instead we represent the grid square separately at the front. Everything in London is in grid square “TQ”. Just to munge things together a bit more, we might drop one digit of precision and drop the spaces to give “TQ316820”.

Don’t ask me how Landranger sheet numbers fit in. I’m going back to my WGS84 thankyou very much.

Paul Downey and London Wiki Wednesdays

Last Wednesday was London wiki wednesday again. We struggled a bit with organisation this time. The usual to’ing-and-fro’ing around finding sponsors and hosts was confounded by a problem with the website. SocialText foolishly switched it to be hidden from… well the web… which really doesn’t help when you’re trying to promote an event. Despite these difficulties, enough people came together at NYK to make for a decent gathering, with some interesting presentations. Actually the low attendance makes for some nice face-to-face group discussions.

For me the highlight was chatting with Paul Downey. I’ve run into him once or twice before, and was familiar with tiddlywiki, which he presented again. This is a somewhat wacky animated javascripty tool which is quite different in it’s interface and behaviour compared to “normal” wikis. Surely the work of an evil genius…

But it turns out Paul Downey is also responsible for this remarkable creation:

see it bigger to read the funny labels. Also with annotations on flickr.

A fascinating cartoony metaphorically abstracted representation of web technologies. I came across this a couple of years ago, while I was still an integration consultant, and I found the “SOA tower of babel” particularly amusing (and accurate)

Aid Information Challenge

I’m at the Aid Information Challenge day watching the final hack presentations. This seems to be part of a series of hacking events happening at the Guardian offices, following on from rewiredstate National Hack the Government day (where I made the find my nearest registry office/hospital thingy).

The idea is to get techy types to meet with people from other areas, in this case aid organisations, and look for ways to bring their skills to bear, preferably in the form of super-quick super-agile thrown-together-on-the-day “hacks” which get presented at the end. I probably should have got more involved in a mapping hack. There was a fair bit of this going on, and I got into a few conversations. Lots more potential for OpenStreetMap hacking and promoting OpenStreetMap by getting it into projects.

Instead though. I mostly busied myself with throwing together this slide deck “OpenStreetMap For Aid Information” which I then presented:

OpenStreetMap For Aid Information

I originally thought I’d have two minutes to talk at the end of the day, but I actually talked for 20 minutes as a side-line talk during the day.The main emphasis of my talk was on two nice recent aid information examples Haiti and Kibera. Some related links:

I also mentioned London events.

placr

For the past few months I’ve been doing some work for placr, and this week I’ve joined the team full-time.

Placr

I’m working on a new transport related API *, with some interesting geolocation and realtime dimensions to it. Currently this is all aimed at partner projects and B2B type clients, so I’m afraid there’s nothing fun to show you yet. Hopefully we shall go public with an API at some point, but it’s not the priority at the moment.

The work is very interesting, and now that I’m not splitting up my week with other things I can try to build up a bit more momentum. We’ve been starting from scratch.  A fresh subversion repo! I wanted to build a RESTful API outputting both XML and JSON, so I’m doing this in Ruby on Rails. I settled on this after doing some experiments with django piston first. Some interesting problems encountered with both though (despite this being very much core to what these frameworks are supposed to be good at)  Still plenty of framework details to work out, but it’s all good fun. I’ve also been using various libraries for HTML scraping.

The team is following (and getting involved in) the various open government data debates, because we’re looking at making use of some of these datasets. These are a moving target at the moment though, so as we look to develop on top of these things, agility is going to be important.

* What’s an API?

These days I’ve been socialising far too much with techy people, and was rather taken aback when someone (might have been my mum) interrupted me in the middle of my well rehearsed little job description to ask “What’s an API?”. It stands for Application Programming Interface.

I rather liked the way Richard Boulton described it as he demo’ed his API at last weekend’s rewired state event. Pointing at a this screen full of data he said “It may not look very nice to you, but to a developer this is beautiful”. That particular screen full of JSON formatted registry office data did look beautiful to me, so I developed this thing last Saturday. An example of an API and an application built to use it.

WhereCamp.EU How was it for me?

WhereCamp.EU Logo by Sophie GreenWhereCamp.EU was pretty mind-blowing. I wrote a few posts to the official site during the event:

From a personal perspective it was massively enjoyable and rewarding, but the whole thing flew by too quickly. Preparations started months ago, but suddenly on the day there was so much to do, and at the same time so many people I wanted to chat to and fascinating sessions I wanted to see.

It got off to quite a blurry-eyed start due to geo-curry with the team the night before, followed by staying up late to prepare slides. As organisers we decided we would need to seed the unconference “wall” with some post-it notes in the first session slot, to get things going and spur other people to participate by setting an example. This meant I was feeling stressed and tired from the off, but it worked well, and despite a lot of people being new to the unconference style, a great atmosphere of participatory buzz carried the proceedings forwards at an alarming pace.

You can read more about my session “The State of the States in OpenStreet Map” on the WhereCamp.EU wiki

state-of-the-states.png

This got a pretty small audience because I was up against some awesome sessions from the other organisers, but I guess I’ll get the opportunity to re-use some of these slides on some other occasion. I might change the background colour. I’d had a few beers with the geo-curry, and the purple-green gradient seemed like a good idea.

I also contributed to the OpenStreetMap Q&A Session (mainly by asking the first question)

On the Saturday I ran another little session called “OpenStreetMap Practical – Never edited OpenStreetMap? Bring your laptop and we’ll show you how”, which kind of worked, although it clearly needed longer than the 15 minutes we had.

The event left me completely shattered, and I was quite surprised when I popped into the pub for a quick pint afterwards to be confronted by a massive crowd of geo-people all enthusiastically continuing the discussions.

I’ve just been checking out some blog responses and write-ups of the event: Gary Gale (vicchi.org) , Guardian Open Platform blogEd Parsons , Steven Feldman (giscussions) , jokru , Eamonn Neylon , James Cheshire (spatialanalysis.co.uk)  As I say, from my perspective the whole thing flew past very quickly and it was quite difficult to know whether the event was actually going well, so it’s gratifying to know that people enjoyed it, and found the format successful.

WhereCamp.EU tomorrow

WhereCamp EU is tomorrow! I’ve been organising the posters:

We have a small team of organisers who are all people from the London geo-conference/meet-up circuit. In particular we have Chris Osborne who frequently puts together the very popular #geomob events, and Gary Gale who seems to live his entire life at geo conferences. These combined with a team of five or six others (including myself) have come together to plan two days of geo-map-technology goodness.

We were very successful with our marketing of the event before and during release of the tickets. Maybe a little too successful. It’s a limited capacity venue, and it is very much at its limit. Some people were slow to book their place. These people …well you can’t come (especially Steve)   Sorry about that 🙁

The posters involved lots of fun playing around with sponsor logos (In truth it was only fun at first, and quickly became a big hassle. But anyway)  We are of course hugely grateful to these organisations:

Gold sponsors: GoeVation & OS OpenSpace, and Guardian Open Platform.

Silver sponsors: Axon Active, bing maps, ERSI UK, Google Maps, data.gov.uk.

Bronze sponsors: DBVU, ito, nestoria, SVGOpen, and Yahoo! Developer Network

Being an “unconference” we haven’t actually planned the content of the conference in a lot of detail. This is where we’re relying on the imagination and motivation of the attendees.

“The attendees drive the content of the sessions on the day instead of having a prescribed schedule and set of content. Therefore, the event is what you make of it, and is only as fun as the people who attend. So be prepared to speak and contribute.”

This may sound chaotic, but I’m reliably informed that it does actually make for an fun and fulfilling event. Looking down the list of attendees, I can see that there will be plenty of amazing ideas. Should be a fair amount of OpenStreetMap related stuff hopefully. I’m excited to see what kind of sessions people come forward with.