We have two London events coming up! A standard pub meet-up this coming Tuesday (4th June), and a tech presentation the week after (Mon 10th June). I’m looking forward to both of these immensely. The pub, because I’ve been wrapped up in work lately and I deserve a beer. The tech presentation, because I’m sure it will be excellent. I manage to get along to the London Ruby User Group semi-regularly anyway, to be with this crowd of ruby developers, but hopefully we’ll have a few OSMers along this time too, for this talk by Andy Allan “Things I’ve learned maintaining OpenStreetMap”. As usual you can find out more about both of these events on the London wiki page (but note you do need to sign up for LRUG following their instructions).

I normally promote these things on mastodon (https://en.osm.town/@OSMLondon) and twitter/x (https://twitter.com/OSMLondon), but you’ll notice the latter is currently showing as “This account doesn’t exist”. That’s because when I logged in as OSMLondon on there it said I should set my birthday. I did immediately think I’d better be careful not to set a date which would make this account under-age, but I thought I was on safe ground making it 20 years old, i.e. the same age as OpenStreetMap (August 2004). But no. Because the OSMLondon account was opened quite a long time ago, back when it would’ve been under-age, apparently setting the birthday this way is an instant “Your account is locked” offense. The resolution path for this, is for OSMLondon to ask their parent/guardian to submit paperwork to twitter and wait to get re-authorised (in some human-moderated queue I presume). Mixed reports about how long that will take. So that’s stupid. I’ve been tweeting details of London events from @OSMLondon since 2010, and now suddenly the account “doesn’t exist”. Maybe I should register a different account, but why’d they have to make this such hard work? @OSMLondon tweeting already got a lot harder for me when they paywalled tweetdeck, but this takes the biscuit.

Hopefully at least some people will find out about these events anyway! Looking forward to seeing you there!