Last Tuesday I met with other OSMers in Edinburgh, we usually meet every 3 months in the Guildford Arms just off Princess Street. There’s no wifi and poor phone reception but I like the old place and there’s a good selection of beer (and soft drinks too). 10 people turned up with a mix of old and new faces. It was great to see OSM attracting more and more interest. There was a small pre-meeting ad-hoc mapping party along Leith Walk. (I’ve made a few edits but still lots to do).

We chatted about all sorts from app development, UAVs to climate change and cloud computing. We had a few members of Edinburgh Hacklab join us - we share a love of making things. Other collaboration is going on with Wikipedia members with an event being planned around mapping, photography and wiki writing about monuments. Also there was talk of Edinburgh Council releasing some Open Data which could be really interesting.

Started planning another mapping party which will be in Shotts in July - more details to follow. And rumblings of another State of the Map Scotland…

We talked a bit about visualisations and the new GPS dump and what other OSM data could be made available. We wondered if tile request data could be looked at - seeing which tiles are the most popular etc. There is some related data and info here .

There’s been lots of map editing in Scotland and Edinburgh over the last three months but we were really impressed by the mapping in the Scottish borders around Kelso - thanks and kudos to ctait

Well, that’s all I recall for now…

Next month, there’s an OSM meeting in Stirling.