Last week I had a few sleepless nights because I was buzzing with OpenStreetMap thoughts and when I did sleep it was with mappy dreams. That's the SOTM effect. State Of The Map 2010 in Girona was another truly spectacular mapfest. A meeting of map professionals and map unprofessionals with a load of paella and sangria on top. Bake for three days.

The weather was pretty sweltering even at 11p.m. when I arrived at the pre-SotM drinks. I had the pleasure of sharing an apartment with Henk and Ivan, the chief organisers. We headed back pretty late, and they then launched into a session of printing badges for attendees (including all the last minute signups) Hard work organising something like this!

But this wasn't just an OpenStreetMap conference. This was an OpenStreetMap musical extravaganza. Henk woke everyone up on the Saturday with a "My Girona" romp around the stage. Hilarious because it just came completely out of the blue. And at the end Ivan earned a standing ovation with his Need a map performance. Quite remarkable. Massive kudos to those two for their musical and organisical efforts.

I set up a session list with links to slides, photos, and (hopefully eventually) video. If you gave a session, or remember some of the session details of a session you saw (e.g. links to add), please dive in and edit. Hopefully soon we'll have all the information anyone needs to remember what happened, and to find out what you missed.

A conference highlight which many people mentioned was the AOL/Patch/Mapquest presentation and their announced plan to invest resources (including hiring people) to the tune of $1 million. You may have missed their earlier announcement which demonstrated willing, and technical "can-do", as they launched open.mapquest.co.uk, a version of the mapquest site powered from OpenStreetMap data and all of our software (the mapnik rendering stack).  It's clear they seriously intend to use OpenStreetMap and to work closely with the community, which is fantastic news!

Yet again Mikel gave a talk about incredible travels to bring OpenStreetMap to far off places: Map Kibera – Mapping one of Africa’s largest slums. Yet again his presentation was utterly enthralling and inspiring. Check out mapkibera.org for the details.

I chose to sit in the main chamber room for most of the sessions, but when I ducked out to the small room for the "Map Track" on Sunday, I saw some sessions which I would list among the highlights (I dunno. Maybe It was just the big room made me fall asleep) :

• Steve Chilton, mapnik wizard, gave a glimpse into the super-detailed super-cartographic world of mapnik stylesheets, as he listed some ideas for what he would like to be able to do with Mapnik. Many of these were also hints at features soon to be added to rendering software.


• David Earl presented his real map on real paper. This reminded me of some intricate fiddling I once did to tweak a small SVG map image for wikipedia: Holborn viaduct  That little map took me more than an hour. David's must've taken a bit longer, particularly as he developed his own PostScript renderer and system to re-apply corrections!


• The creators of MapOSMatic, two brothers, showed us how they did it. They played down their achievements, saying that they were very much using pre-built components and open source code from the community, but it's clear they've made a  really great, and very mainstream use-able OpenStreetMap powered tool.

I found a lot of sessions quite thought provoking. I could write a lot more about all of these:

• I will write a post about my talk. This was about mapping parties as part of the "community track".  I thought Thea Clay's talk counterpoised it very nicely. UPDATE: See my blog post 'Talks and thoughts on OpenStreetMap mapping parties'


• David Earl presented his design of a system called "Tag Central".  I disagreed with many of the ideas, or at least I think they would create all sorts of new (worse) problems, but very interesting to think about, and I did like some of the ideas. Some great chats with him over ice-creams on the Monday after too


• The "What's wrong with OpenStreetMap?" panel (<- video available) was controversial as Chris had intended.  Ongoing twitter bickering this past week and other fallout which you can see over on Tom Chance's blog post. I have lots of opinions of my own, but for now let's just say it was thought provoking.

There were other moments of disharmony. This year the license panel kicked up a few thorny questions (Nothing about the license, just lots of "what if" questions about what would happen if lots of people voted "no" through the fear of lots of people voting "no") Maybe we'll settle that one day. Other debates were settled over mug water flinging.

Overall though, there was an OpenStreetMaptastically friendly atmosphere. Great to meet all the HOT people who had deployed to Haiti. Great to meet lots of other people for the first time and lots of people who I'd like to meet more often. State Of The Map 2010 felt like a coming together of all my OpenStreetMap friends from around the world.