Harry Wood's diary
Pately Bridge Mapping PartyI was up in Yorkshire for the weekend for a friend's wedding, so I had signed up to also go along to the Pately Bridge Mapping party. On the Saturday we had utterly miserable weather in West Yorkshire. Francine decided there was no way she was getting up early to go to another mapping party in the rain. I very nearly opted to stay in bed too, but my dad and I decided to go for it.
Good job we did, because unbeknownst to me there was an email sitting in my inbox from Chippy, the guy organising it, saying "i'm flat on my back with some kind of fever-flu". We arrived in the Pately Bridge car park, and waited for him, and gradually it emerged that other people were doing the same (should've brought my OpenStreetMap cap) Then Rollo, a guy from from the AGI northern group, arrived with a bunch of other people, a gathering of ~20 people, at which point it emerged that I was the only one with any OpenStreetMap know how! It seems Chippy had done a better job than expected at attracting newbies from the AGI northern group and also Leeds university.
So we crouched around some dubious printouts my dad had run off, and I drew a cake diagram there in the car park. I gave them a rough description of the kinds of things to be making a note of, and sent people off on their merry way. Mostly we were in teams of three or four, some borrowing GPS units from the well equipped Mike Shankster from the environment agency.
We met back for lunch in the Bridge Inn. This was a pretty big pub, but not quite big enough for a large party. What's more some people had brought pic-nic food and some people hadn't arrived yet, so we didn't have much choice but to sit outside. We had a nice lunch and a nice chat about OpenStreetMap
But when everyone gathered around the technology expecting to see something amazing, things rapidly and somewhat predictably started to go wrong:
- We had one mobile internet dongle, which was hopelessly slow.
- Downloading JOSM would've taken too long, but Helen had a JOSM jar on her laptop... this turned out to be a very old pre API0.6 version (doesn't work)
- A lot of people were using Garmin Geko's. There's lots of helpful information the wiki about how to get data from a Geko, but I've only found this afterwards. I probably would've attempted the gpsbabel approach, but again, downloading gpsbabel, or even surfing to instructions on using it, was too slow on that connection.
But actually in the end the real killer was... we were sat outside
- No plug sockets, and so while struggling with above issues, the various laptops we had were started to switch themselves off!
- I finally got to the stage where I could demonstrate JOSM, but realised that outside in the daylight I could hardly see the screen even while sat next to it, never mind trying to do it as as a demo with everyone gathered around
- Everyone was getting a bit cold. We needed to get moving again!
For that many people, all newbies, we really needed to have a function room booked somewhere with internet connection. Too many newbies is an unusual kind of problem! I hope I can get in touch with everyone and maybe email their data to them and help them to figure out what to do with it.
Everyone set off to do a bit more walking to warm up. Dad and I went back up the valley to finish off the area above the reservoir. Later in the afternoon the clouds finally parted more convincingly for a decent spell of sunshine. No rain the whole day, which was a lot better than the weather forecast!
Get well soon chippy!
Coordinates:Posted by Harry Wood at Mon, 08 Jun 2009 13:38:41 +0000 in English (English)
Comment from daveemtb at Mon, 08 Jun 2009 18:08:35 +0000
Sounds like a bit of a nightmare! Hope everyone managed to figure out what to do with the info they had collected afterwards!
Comment from RichardB at Tue, 09 Jun 2009 12:01:55 +0000
I was thinking of going, but saw the poor weather forecast.
Sounds like I missed out. Weather was awful at times in North Cheshire.
Comment from helen wood at Tue, 09 Jun 2009 18:03:34 +0000
It was a lovely day. Though my African colleagues did start to shiver at the pub, but they survived and were eating ice cream later. I had an inverter in the car for the laptop but I think it wouldn't of been very practical to gather around the car. Well done for keeping everyone so engaged in difficult circumstances Harry. We have started to edit our data in JOSM and had a go at downloading data and converting it to shapefiles so we can use it in our university work. The African lads were all very keen to use what they have learnt when they get back to their respective countries.
