Last night we mapped Kilburn (A London mapping evening) or at least some of us did some mapping before meeting the lazy ones in the pub :-)

I took a bus all the way up Kilburn High Road, past where it becomes the dubiously named "Shoot Up hill" and mapped the section called CrickleWood Broadway. It's all the same road, and pretty much all full of the same crappy little shops. I walked along and took a photo of each and every one of them, so it looks like I've got several hours of farting around with AgPifoJ ahead of me (haven't done it yet). I'll try to add shop=* nodes for each of them, and also get addr:housenumber off the shop signs. As I mentioned before, there's wiki work to do on documenting different types of shop tags better. I'll no doubt spot a few tagging dilemmas while I'm going through these photos of crappy little shops. For example:

That's the kind of crappy little shop I'm talking about. How do you tag these things? ...and does anyone really care? The other problem with crappy little shops, is that they're often closed in a "does that shop ever open?" kind of way. Maybe I'll just put shop=yes for some of them.

So anyway. Lots of pointing cameras at shops. This no doubt seems a bit odd to the passers by, and the kind of people passing by on Cricklewood Broadway were generally not the kind of people I wanted to be explaining openstreetmap to. I think a good way to reduce the chance of confrontations, is to be visibly pointing the camera upwards at the shop signs rather than the street level with people in it. People don't like to be in photos, which I guess is fair enough. I even angle my head as if I'm actually interested in what's going on higher up the building.

This seemed to work although at one point a police van pulled up right next to me. I hadn't noticed it approach, and I was sure they were going to get out and question me. Luckily they were just going to talk to some people outside a crappy little shop. I did also attract unwanted attention from drunkards on two different occasions. One gave me a history lesson (Cricklewood Broadway used to be a roman road apparently) another offered to take my photo standing by the pub (yeah... no thanks.... not that I don't trust you or anything)

Meanwhile back at the pub...

Daylight! The Black Lion has big windows and very tall ornately decorated ceiling. Quite pleasant, although a bit echoey and loud. We had a pretty good turn out (about 10 of us?) and we eventually hustled our way onto our own table, but not before explaining openstreetmap and presenting leaflets to the people we had been sharing it with!

As usual there was plenty of chat about the openstreetmap servers, this time commenting on the shoddy rackmount set-up we have in the UCL server room. Our shiney new database server doesn't fit properly. We'd be interested in a donation of better racks if anyone knows anyone. Not sure what kind we need exactly.

The J2ME enthusiasts were out in force, and Kai was showing me the latest GpsMid app, now with live editing! (although only changing tags on ways at the moment) I took some action photos which turned out a bit blurry and dark, but they're on the GpsMid wiki page

It was good to have User:Welshie along this time. He's a long time mapper who has had his area around Barnet mapped out since the project's early days. I've been working on my area, to try to push the NoNames boundary away from my house, but there's a big chunk around Tottenham which people now have their eye on for a future mapping party. We'll do this as a little weekend party including BBQ round my house I reckon. Details still to be worked out...

...but behold the advanced planning! The next event will be in Peckham and we already have it set up complete with pub choice and cake diagram thanks to Tom Chance. So get yourself signed up on there if you fancy some South London mapping action in 2 weeks time.