Fareham Mapping Party 2009

Background

Fareham is a medium sized town in Hampshire, close to Portsmouth. Most of its streets have been mapped through Yahoo! aerial imagery, but large numbers are missing street names; also many points of interest need adding. The aim of this mapping party on Sunday Nov 1st, organised jointly with the Hampshire branch of the British Computer Society, will be to fill in as many of the street names as possible, and also collect as many points of interest as possible.

Arrangements

UPDATE 0825 Sun 1 Nov: Due to extremely bad weather conditions, I am proposing to postpone the event to 1200 when the weather is predicted to clear. However I will turn up at Fareham myself at 1000 in case anyone is there. PLEASE PHONE ME BY 1030 on 07950 347717 if you propose to come at 1200, or later, so that I can wait for you.

Meet at the front of Fareham station at 10.00am. No GPS needed though if you have one, please bring it. We'll then adjourn briefly to a suitable venue (coffee shop or similar), to be confirmed, for half an hour to an hour to plan the day.

Paper sheets covering areas of the town without street names will be distributed on the day; you can use these to mark street names and points of interest. We will map until approx. 5pm then go to a venue to review the day's progress. There will hopefully also be a JOSM (editor) demonstration session for those of you new to OSM, and Potlatch (online editor) too if we find somewhere with wifi. This is dependent on the weather: if it's wet, I'll be unable to bring my laptop unless someone has a car where I can keep it. If you do, please ring me (nickw) on 07950 347717.

Map

Area to be mapped

Whole of Fareham, showing area to be mapped

Results

Despite weather that resembled a tropical storm making landfall on the south coast of England in the morning, we had quite a good crowd all things considered: 6 of us, including 4 new to OSM. After retreating to Caffe Nero to sit the storm out, with an interesting talk on local history on the way, we set out to gather street names from the western part of the town. Not everyone's uploaded yet, but I think we've pretty much finished off the job, bar maybe the odd isolated unnamed street.