Last week we had a pub meet-up in Holborn shortly followed by a real mapping party involving real mapping, over in Weybridge

In the pub we had another bumper turnout, including quite a few new faces, which is what we like to see. Maybe spacing out the events to every three weeks makes for a more popular gathering, or maybe 2012 is going to be a year for big London gatherings (let's hope so!) ...or maybe everyone secretly loves the cheapo prices of wetherspoons.

We had along @MathieuLoutre who is working on a 3D game engine, experimenting with the buildings data in London. Looks pretty nice (another pic here) and he says he'll be open sourcing his code for that. Makes all that building mapping worthwhile heh? Mind you we'll need to add some building:levels data in London to make 3D stuff work really well (He's randomised the building heights slightly here to get reasonable effect)

We talked about Derick's awesome year of edits 2011 video which has been played 10,000 times now! He's interested now in doing some animation experiments building on the style of the Brighton mapping party video he made

There were many other topics of discussion including a funny "old farts" conversation with me, Andy, and Matt late at night after everyone else had left.
I'll tell you what else we talked about just as soon as I've found that peice of paper again!

And the Weybridge mapping party? Also awesome, but it was a good reminder of why we don't generally do mapping parties at this time of year. I gave up mapping when I couldn't feel my toes any more.

It was surprisingly well attended by OSMLondon folks considering it's quite a long train ride out (more people than shown in the above photo). I think we're all keen to try to make some progress with the massive patch of red in Southwest London. We've blown a nice hole it now but still plenty more work to be done. It's upsetting to me that User:80n was never persuaded to accept the license change, and now effectively seeks to damage OpenStreetMap. He ran the first mapping parties that I ever attended, and back in those days he really showed the way when it came to mapping dedication. He pretty much invented OSM mapping. Ah well.

I have some more photos including an attempt at some (cold) sunshine mapping action shots. Coming soon.

Geomob is tonight! I'm going to be late in fact. If you're in the area (Gower Street) come along. It's going to be extra OpenStreetMappy this time, with three different talks on OSM topics!