Norfolk/Meetups

June 2019

The next OSM meeting took place on Saturday, 22th June 2019, from 2pm in The Rumsey Wells pub in Norwich. Any questions, please contact nkn@posteo.net (Nora).

Some of the things discussed were

• Walking and cycle routing. As well as the routing options built in to the main OSM site, Cycle Streets and Cycle.Travel also use OSM for cycle routing.
• UK Quarterly Projects. The current one is looking at shopping areas in towns and cities (Gregrs's FHRS Comparison Tool was mentioned for helping to find missing or closed food outlets). The next one will be solar energy mapping.
• OSM Mailing Lists. You can subscribe and/or read the messages online. We also talked about the possibility of setting up a regional list for East Anglia, to help with coordinating these meetings. user:rjw62 will look in to this. So far, Nora has been using the Talk GB mailing list and Who's around me to contact local mappers directly.
• OSM Editors. There are other editors besides the default iD. Potlatch is another online editor (which can be accessed via the down arrow next to the usual edit button). JOSM is a separate program. It's more complicated uto use but had lots of advanced features and plugins (including for tracing and mapping buildings).
• Mobile apps and tools. We mentioned a few, including OsmAnd, StreetComplete, MAPS.ME, OSM Tracker, and Another Activity Tracker.
• Public Rights of Way. Rowmaps.com has a lot of official data from Councils, but not all of it is under a verified licence for use in OSM. The {Tag:designation} tag can be used to indicated Rights of Way in OSM. Tools to help with mapping include MapThePaths and Rights of Way Progress.
• Mapping Party Meetup. We talked about the idea of meeting somewhere near Norwich and doing some coordinated mapping in the future. North Walsham was suggested as a possible venue.

11-May-2019 Norwich

A group of five mappers met at 2pm in The Rumsey Wells pub in Norwich (Talk-GB Mailing list thread). Topics discussed included:

• The Don't Lose Your Way initiative from the Ramblers Association, related to the 2026 cut-off date for recording historic Rights of Way. Data on existing PRoWs in Rowmaps was mentioned, and Robert Whittaker's PRoW OSM tools. update: the Norfolk branch of the Ramblers Association (another Ian) maintains a s/sheet of around 500 actual and potential Rights of Way in Norfolk, together with a large shared repository of evidentiary files

• Mobile mapping/editing. Some suggestions: Maps.me bookmarks for collecting information, Vespucci or Go_Map!! for mobile editing.

• Welcoming / encouraging new mappers. We talked a bit about issues facing new mappers, and how information isn't always easy to find. Learn OSM might be useful.

• Extracting data from OSM for use in tools etc. The Overpass_API is often used here, or Geofabrik Extracts. For direct queries, Overpass turbo can be useful.

• Future Meetings. There were a few more people who'd expressed interest in meeting up, but couldn't make this meeting. It was thought worthwhile to arrange another meeting in a month or two's time, probably in Norwich again. Future meetings could take place elsewhere (perhaps on a train line from Norwich) and be combined with some mapping activities. It might be useful to look at what works for other UK communities that have regular meetups, e.g. Nottingham/Pub_Meetup and Mappa_Mercia.

Those present included: Robert Whittaker (on osm, edits, contrib, heatmap, chngset com.) Nora (on osm, edits, contrib, heatmap, chngset com.)