Victoria mapping party - September 2007
This is a past event which took place in September 2007
OpenStreetMap - coming to a street near you, this fall. Proprietary data has no-where to hide.
When
Due to popular demand, the dates of the mapping party were extended. Saturday 22nd, Sunday 23rd and Monday 24th September and also September 27th following the FOSS4G wrapup
Where
Canada:British Columbia:Victoria (not the Australian Victoria!) - map
Meeting Time and Places
Sunday
| Time | Venue | OSM |
|---|---|---|
| 10:00 | Meet at the Hillside Mall food court on the corner of Hillside and Shelbourne, Victoria (osm map) | |
| 13:00 | Meet at the Hillside Mall food court on the corner of Hillside and Shelbourne, Victoria (osm map) | |
| 17:00 - 18:00 | Meet up after mapping with FOSS4G delegates at The Sticky Wicket | |
| 20:00 | Out to dinner. |
Monday
| Time | Venue | OSM |
|---|---|---|
| 09:30 | Dolce Vita on Douglas Street | |
| 13:00 | Meet for lunch, The Sticky Wicket OSM | |
| 17:00 - 18:00 | Meet up after mapping, The Sticky WicketOSM | |
| 20:00 | Out to dinner. |
Thursday
| Time | Venue | OSM |
|---|---|---|
| 15:30 | Dolce Vita on Douglas Street |
Who Can Map/How to Map?
Almost anyone can map with OpenStreetMap. Victoria will provide an interesting mix of mapping opportunities. Urban areas are extremely data rich, meaning that there is a lot of stuff to map. We also have very good satellite imagery coverage from Yahoo! for a large part of Victoria. This means that having a GPS unit won't be necessary, but will still be useful if you have one.
A good plan for the weekend would be to meet up on Saturday morning, and decide which areas of the city each person would like to map. After that, we can head out and use print-offs of the Yahoo! imagery and existing OSM maps to mark street names on. Every couple of hours, mappers will probably want to stop off and transfer the information that has been collected and noted on paper to OSM's database.
Where to Map
This image suggests some areas that individuals or groups could tackle. Splitting an area into regions helps mappers to concentrate on a specific area and helps to stop duplicate mapping (different people going down the same street)
What to bring
- GPS Unit - useful, but not necessery
- Pens and Paper - very useful
- Dictaphone - useful
- Laptop - very useful if we have WiFi Access
- Bicycle - very useful for city mapping
- Car - good for longer country roads
- If you are new to the project and would like to get an idea of what is involved with mapping, please check out the Map Making Overview page for more resources.
Useful Software
If you want to use your own laptop, you will need a program to talk to your GPS, get the GPS tracks and convert them from whatever format the GPS uses, to GPX, the format that is required by the OSM API. Many mapper use GPSBabel - an open source utility that will run on most platforms. You can find more information about GPSBabel and other similar software here.
Please, provide newbies with details about useful software to install and configure on laptop/PDA.
Useful Information
Organiser Info
For information or enquiries, call or email Nick - nick@asklater.com +447835054292 or Corey - corey.burger@gmail.com.
Who's going?:
- User:nickb - probably renting a bike, will have gps units to lend out.
- User:CoreyBurger - lives in Victoria
- User:jrreid - Coming to Victoria for FOSS4G 2007
- User:AndrewTurner - FOSS4G
- User:Mloskot - FOSS4G
- User:artemp - arriving on Sunday, possibly renting a bike.
- User:CoryHorner - lives in Victoria/@FOSS4G
- There's also an upcoming event
Publicity
- A press release can be found here.
- http://www.blacksworld.net/blog/?p=126
- wikitravel victoria
- HarbourLiving
Things to organise
- GPS Units - user:nickb will bring these
- Print outs of OSM maps and Yahoo imagery. Should be enough to split between all the mappers. Print outs of Y! imagery are particularly useful for downtown areas - places with dense street networks where GPS reception may be poor. Print outs of OSM maps are useful to show mappers which areas have been mapped and which haven't. There is no definitive answer to which areas need to be printed - but the more areas that are printed the more areas that can be mapped. In the past, I have found it difficult to try to stitch together vast numbers of map sheets - this often doesn't work, so printing off a load of large scale maps on A4 isn't a good idea. If someone has access to a large (A2 +) plotter, this will be useful to show progress.
- Info Sheets - Nick will make and print out a load of info sheets about the project.
Links:
Canada:British_Columbia:Victoria FOSS4G2007 - The Open Source Geo conference is being held in Victoria between the 24th and 27th September, 2007.