A last Wednesday's London pub meet-up we had PIES! The Daniel Gooch in Bayswater seems to be run by a Scottish chap with access to little Scottish pies. We brought along our own Scottish chap who verified the scottishness of the pies. Rather good, and a bargain at £4.50. Other good things about the pub included cashback at the till, cheap soft drinks, and an interesting ceiling. The pub might have lost marks for having a big loud football match on, but we managed to hide down a funny little hole away from the noise. Here's photos of us in our funny little hole:

flickr

Lots of interesting conversation:

We talked about the new FCGI C++ implementation of the OpenStreetMap "map" call (code) which had been deployed earlier that day. This boosts the speed of data downloads for the OpenStreetMap editors, although the speed-up is mainly noticeable when fetching very large amounts of map data. This might just encourage more people to abuse the feature (It's intended for editing software, but gets used for other things where planet extract downloads would be more appropriate) so we joked about adding a wait in there :-)

That lead into discussion about acceptable use of the tile server. Currently the serving of OpenStreetMap maps is very centralised, with massive bandwidth being used to blast out tile images from one server. The end-users are often viewing the map on the OpenStreetMap.org homepage, but often not. There's now a massive range of websites using embedded maps, and mobile apps displaying maps direct from our tile server. As this bandwidth usage grows, it could become an issue. Andy was making the point that the foundation should be thinking about offloading the strain of tile serving. We would do this by tightening up the Tile Usage Policy. We could disallow any non-project related site to display tiles from the main server. This is a pretty upsetting scenario. In the short-term cutting off access to thousands of sites and apps using OpenStreetMap would cause massive disruption confusion and widespread severe annoyance, after that it would also mean less people would turn to using OpenStreetMap because we would no longer be doing the google thing of providing ultra-easy embeddable maps. But the point is that people would still take planet downloads and run tile servers elsewhere, in fact this would immediately become much more prevalent. In this way the project would continue to serve maps to the world, and would organically become rather pleasantly de-centralised leaving the resources at the project core to be focussed on the important bit: the read/write wiki-style map data API. It's a little bit alarming to think about these scenarios and consequences, but it's a sort of hypothetical "what if" discussion at the moment. Tile serving bandwidth is not infinite though.

We talked about holding another hack weekend. Between us we could probably find a London venue, although Matt has been talking to Frederick about doing one in Germany too. Need to remember to talk about it this again at the next meet-up, and actually pick a date perhaps.

We talked about completion, and in particular the state of the U.K. It was decided that "we should just finish it". So there you have it folks! You heard it here first. We're just going to finish the U.K. now. ...actually no. I think you've probably heard that before somewhere :-) I'm not sure I understood the point of this conversation. There was a serious plan to do with B roads and minor roads, but I don't remember. Anyway the conversation was surely a symptom of mapping withdrawal. An early itch starting to appear as we ponder the summer ahead. (Update: Andy blogged Finishing the UK road network)

Excellent evening. I think The Daniel Gooch is one we should go back to. The next pub meet-up is already scheduled and looking like it's going to be a big one. Wednesday February 10 - Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese on Fleet Street. Come along! (Although we chat about these in-depth topics, we're always hoping to get more newbies joining us)