Mapping Kings Cross tomorrow (Thu) evening. Could be a big one. Come along!

Last night I spent an hour or so sketching some roads in Tehran. This was my little contribution to the efforts of the Humanitarian OSM Team. I was doing some armchair mapping, adding some missing motorways and also tweaking some roads around Azadi Square, which looks beautiful in the Yahoo aerial imagery. Not such a beautiful place to be yesterday unfortunately.

"Heavy restrictions have been placed on the BBC and other foreign news organisations. Reporters are not allowed to cover unauthorised gatherings or move around freely in Tehran ... Our correspondent says the picture outside Tehran is more confused but there are reports of demonstrations and government attacks on demonstrations." - BBC

Freedom of speech is a basic human right, and an essential ingredient of properly conducted elections. After the election Iranians are showing that, if they are not given freedom of speech, they can start to use new technologies to take it for themselves, with a bit of help.

Maps can be a part of that. We can geolocate information coming out of Iran, but we'll need decent maps to show it on. But check this out. At some point in the past 12 hours flickr switched their background maps to use OpenStreetMap when showing geolocated photos in Tehran.

Good stuff. Our maps must be good, but there's plenty more armchair mapping work to do based on Yahoo aerial imagery there. Pretty good way to spend an hour while there's nothing on TV I'd say.