OpenStreetMap at Where2.0Now

Posted on by Harry Wood

At Where2.0Now I presented the OpenStreetMap idea with these slides:

OpenStreetMap talk at Where2.0Now on slideshare

I will post a video link if and when it comes available, but here’s a wee photo for the time being:

Harry Wood presenting at Where2.0Now

Promoting OpenStreetMap

I like to highlight similarities with wikipedia. The approach of letting anyone edit without strict moderation, the wiki “soft security” approach, really does work. But I think to some people this will seem unlikely, particularly if they’ve never heard about the details of Wikipedia. Hopefully this audience was web-savvy enough to get the idea.

The usual pitch was modified slightly. Normally we’ll say “Mapping is fun! Go out and try it!”, as a core message. I did mention mapping techniques, including the simple pencil & paper (something else I always like to highlight) but with a room full of GIS industry people I mainly tried to talk more about using OpenStreetMap. The last slide is a new one where I encouraged people not just to view OSM as a source for a one-off data download, but as an ongoing collaboration with other interesting possibilities. You can tap into the updates stream, you can contribute data back and benefit from further updates, and you can contact the OpenStreetMap community to ask questions and get involved.

Promoting CloudMade

Naturally I mentioned CloudMade services a few times.

The CloudMade style editor is an exciting tool for anyone interested in trying out quick and easy custom OpenStreetMap renderings.

I also mentioned Cloudmade downloads which offer more manageable (country level) extracts than the full Planet downloads aswell as ESRI shapefile downloads, all for free!

I’m still working for CloudMade for a few more weeks, but even if I wasn’t, it’s pretty natural to drop in a mention of these things when talking to firms about using open licensed geodata. There’s a bunch of other interesting products for geo-developers on the site.

Promoting myself

Of course the conference was a great opportunity to make a start at promoting myself. Things are winding up at the CloudMade London office which is sad, but the OpenStreetMap project is going from strength to strength, as is the geo-scene in general. In 2010, after I get back from Christmas in Brazil, my plan is to start freelance IT contracting work (although not ruling out permanent positions) I’d love to continue doing OpenStreetMap work, but I’m still trying to gauge how likely that is. Any hints/tips/ideas/job offers are welcome!

Where2.0Now AGI Northern Group Conference

Posted on by Harry Wood

Yesterday was the Where2.0Now conference of the AGI Northern Group.

Where 2.0 Now banner

Here’s the list of speakers again:

Rollo Home did a great job organising this, and managed to put together a really interesting day. There was all the usual geo-buzz and excitement around neogeo technologies which we see at London tech conferences and meet-ups, and this is always fun, but yesterday was interesting for a couple of other reasons.

Firstly there was lots of guys in suits there. Like at the other AGI geoconference events, the “traditional” GIS industry was out in force. A lot of the speakers (myself included) were taking the opportunity to spread the “neogeo” message to these people. It was also an opportunity for we cheeky whippersnappers to learn a thing or two from them. Lots more work to do on this. I feel the OpenStreetMap community in particular have a lot to learn and a lot more to offer big-business GIS firms if we could only learn to speak their language better. As usual, the conference participants widely agreed that there’s no point drawing strong distinctions between neogeographers and paleogeographers, and as usual we went ahead and did it anyway 🙂

Secondly the event was interesting because it was definitely not in the The South. No… not in California either. We ventured up to Harrogate in North Yorkshire to reach a whole new audience. We should do this more often. Thanks to GeoPlan for a great venue, and thanks to my mate Paul for putting me up at his house.

Some follow ups…

Blog posts: Tim Waters, Ed Parsons, Steven Feldman , John Fagan

The busy #geocom twitter stream was preserved as a pdf by Steven Feldman    Total failure to tweet by me I’m afraid.These MindMaps from Ant Beck give a nice overview of topics covered in the talks.

(update) I have blogged again with a little more detail of what my talk was about. I have uploaded my slides to slideshare with a ‘geocom’ tag (munged with the other events in the series). Maybe  they’ll be uploaded separately by the geocommunitylive user too.

Videos of the talks were also made, but probably won’t see the light of day for a while (…so surprise me)

OSM talk at London Wiki Wednesdays

Posted on by Harry Wood

London Wiki Wednesdays last night (Wednesday night in fact) was pretty good. It was kindly hosted by NYK line in the amazing city point tower. Here’s the slides for the little talk I gave:

‘OpenStreetMap : The Wikipedia of Maps’ on slideshare

In fact on the second slide you can see the city point tower in the aerial imagery screenshot.

My talk was explaining the similarities between this large open mapping collaboration, and wikipedia. Although mainly it was just a very quick run through of OpenStreetMap.  ( Some links related to the slides: the Flash editor, the desktop app editor, API, mapping techniques, gordo’s photo, stats, the Open License, opencyclemap.org, openpistemap.org, Hiking Map, Whitewater Maps, bus map, CloudMade style editor, and a zoomed in map of the building  )

David Terrar is back in the wiki mood and managing to secure venues and sponsors for future months, so I think it’s looking good. It will be somewhere different in November. Check back on the London page for details

London Wiki Wednesdays are back tonight

Posted on by Harry Wood

London Wiki Wednesdays

There was a series of monthly London Wiki Wednesdays events with presentations and networking chit-chat, all about wikis, blogs and social media technology, mostly as applied to enterprise use. Sadly they stopped happening back in 2008    ….but tonight they’re back!

London Wiki Wednesdays 7th October 2009

When I first went to Wiki Wednesdays a couple of years ago, I was massively enthusiastic about wiki collaboration in open content communities such as wikipedia, entirely for fun, as a hobby (though mostly pursued while bored at work). The events really opened my eyes to the possibility of working in this arena. I wanted a piece of this action. At the same time I was getting hooked on OpenStreetMap. Wiki-style collaboration to build a free map of the world. Since the last Wiki Wednesdays meet-up I’ve ditched my more dull I.T. job and got myself a job working full time on OpenStreetMap, so this evening I’m returning victorious!

I’m going to give a talk about OpenStreetMap. The talks are only 5 mins, so hopefully they’ll be a bunch of other talks. Often these are about behind-the-firewall or b2b collaboration style uses. Should be good.

Community Smoothness

Posted on by Harry Wood

Back in July we had a fantastic conference all about OpenStreetMap. I did a write up of ‘The State Of The Map 2009’ back then, but I didn’t mention my talk on “Community Smoothness”.

Sadly the proper video of my talk is not available yet, but you can hear my talk and see the slides as a video (15 minutes long.  14Mb download) :

“Community Smoothness” talk : m4v format, or mov format

Or you can see just the slides on slideshare.

I will update this with a link if and when the real video comes available.

It’s a talk about debates within the OpenStreetMap Community, particularly “tagging” debates.

  • An explanation of the big debate we had about the “smoothness” tag, and how this led people to question the wiki processes.
  • A run through of common suggestions to fix the process, and problems with these ideas: The idea of creating a tagging committee, and ideas of locking the wiki page, or creating other restricted lists (such as downloadable PDFs or preset files) which boil down to the same thing.
  • Technical solutions, creating separate web-apps which list tags: Featurama, TagWatch, OSMdoc, Tagstat, Floaty cloud-Tagwatch-on-steroids. [Update: TagInfo is the one to use now, and happily seems to be longer lasting]
  • My suggestions for simple social solutions: Write out tagging policies as with the Verifiability page. Maybe supply motivation for people to be more critical of tagging proposals. Long-standing community members should display more information leading to respect within the community, or give out awards and write testimonials to each other more. Most importantly, we should generally improve the standards of existing tag documentation as a way of raising the bar to new proposals.
  • Closing remark: We should always seek positive outcomes from debates, and look for ways of taking action.

Since giving this talk, everyone in the OpenStreetMap community is following my advice, and a new spirit of harmonious cooperation has settled over the project….  and look! There’s a pig flying past 🙂

Sea Kayaking Around Flamborough Head

Posted on by Harry Wood

We whitewater kayakers always joke about how we’ll take up sea kayaking when we’re old and no longer hardcore, but hey I’m thirty now so…

Flamborough head Saturday sunshine - Photo Rik Williams

A fairly big group of us “oldies” decided to go for a weekend of sea kayaking. It was also originally supposed to be an experiment in multi-day expeditioning, but some of the oldies were not even hardcore enough for that, so we didn’t bother trying to cram tents and sleeping bags into our boats, and just parked up the car near our overnight camping spot.

Flamborough head is a craggy peninsular on Yorkshire’s East coast (map), with spectacular white cliffs and caves. Exploring these was good fun, and mostly not too scary, although I did have a lingering feeling that a slight misjudgement of a wave could leave you with broken bones. Mostly the waves were fun too, and quite surfable in places. In retrospect though there were hardly any waves at all on the Saturday, and blue skies.

Sunday’s waves on the other hand were really quite something. Here’s Rik’s photo of me setting off into the relatively small waves of this sheltered inlet.

Flamborough waves on sunday - photo Rik Williams

Further out beyond the breakers, we were bobbing up and down with some really mountainous waves rolling beneath us (the ones you kind of see in the distance). The wind was blowing onshore, but also slightly to one side, so we could get across to the next cove, staying well away from the cliffs this time, but we had to abandon attempts at getting back. That all felt fairly hardcore, although we were off the water and into a tearoom by midday like the bunch of OAPs we are.

photos by Rik Williams, stolen from his facebook album

Where2.0Now? AGI NG Conference in November

Posted on by Harry Wood

AGI logoI’m going to be speaking at Where2.0Now?, a conference of the AGI (Association for Geographic Information) Northern Group in Harrogate on 10th Nov. There’ll be talks from Chris Osborne, Chris Parker, Craig Moulding, Dr Michael Sanderson, Dr. Andrew Hudson-Smith, Dr. Richard Kingston, Ed Parsons, Gary Gale, Jo Cook, John Fagan, John McKerrell, Prof. Henk Scholten, Stuart Harrison, Tim Warr, Tim Waters. …and me! (Those following “Geographic Information” circles will recognise some names. It’s a good line-up. Not to be missed if you’re up North)

My talk will be 20mins all about OpenStreetMap.org of course. It will be based on my hour and half BCS talk and also covering more uses of OpenStreetMap. …so I may need to condense it down a bit!

UPDATE:  Where2.0Now AGI Northern Group Conference

30th Birthday BBQ

Posted on by Harry Wood

Big thanks to everyone who came and helped me celebrate my 30th birthday! Lots of people came and squeezed into my back garden for a BBQ. It was really great to assemble this random collection of mates. It was that classic slightly odd meeting of worlds, with groups of kayakers meeting OpenStreetMappers, meeting friends from back home, meeting brothers and sisters, and everyone in-between. Having said that we did partition off into different parts of the garden quite effectively. Hopefully everyone had fun. Much meat and beer was consumed, and best of all we actually had sunshine!

Comedy highlight was hearing everyone singing “Happy Birthday” with a dawning collective realisation that I was actually upstairs on the toilet at the time!


Where’s Harry?

More photos on facebook

Sunshine and Feijoada

Posted on by Harry Wood

For my girlfriend’s birthday we had a big weekend of sunshine and fun. I took her for a posh meal in the OXO tower on Friday, then we had a party on Saturday, with a sunny garden full of people.  Friends from Holmfirth travelled here for the weekend, so on Sunday we all went for a sunny walk in hampstead heath and and look around sunny Camden market. I’ve just stuck many sunny photos on facebook, but here I’d like share this photo with you…

feijoada_sm.jpg
Feijoada! We had to go shopping for a special kind of black beans to make this Brazilian dish. The big Morrisons didn’t have them. Eventually we found them in a little supermarket on Severn sisters’ road, and we bought their entire stock. About 20 tins of beans for the party  …Yummy!