We're having another mapping party in Liverpool at long last. Concentrating on Netherton we'll be trying to improve the mapping in North Liverpool and fill in some gaps. There's a wiki page with more information, if you're thinking of coming please sign up on there:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/LiverpoolMappingParty_June09

Well, to catch up on two months of mapping... safe to say I got the bit south of Mather Avenue completed, though it didn't happen until the Sunday of the mapping party. Oh yes, and we had the Liverpool Mapping Party. That went really well, we were lucky to have quite a few experienced mappers present so we got loads done around the centre of Liverpool, but also stretching into Toxteth and Aigburth, and up to Everton.

Over the weekend I decided to finish off some bits that Grant (Firefishy) marked up after the mapping party. He'd added some roads coming off Garmoyle road in Wavertree, but hadn't added road names to them. I completed all the roads that came off Garmoyle road (including ones he hadn't mapped). Also a few more roads in the area. I then went a little further South and picked up some more roads around Greenbank. Unfortunately I missed another set of roads that Grant had mapped but not put names on North of Sefton Park but they should be easy enough to get when I'm passing sometime.

So, I've been looking at the map of Liverpool numerous times over the past few days and I've really been wondering how long can be left before all of Liverpool south of Edge Lane is finished. Granted there's a big chunk that needs mapping between Edge Lane and Picton Road, basically the whole of Wavertree needs mapping, and even when that's done, there's bits of Aigburth, Dingle, and even a little bit of Allerton that need doing. I can't help but thinking though that this all really shouldn't take too long. Unfortunately with the terrible weather we've been having I haven't been getting out mapping very much myself, similarly I don't think my Dad has been going out much either so that's definitely going to hold things up, but I'm really hoping that it won't be too long before we can say "South Liverpool is mapped". No way I'll put a timeframe on it though as I'll almost certainly get it wrong :-p

Got the A0 printout yesterday, unfortunately it's quite zoomed out - Liverpool being quite a big city - so it's hard to see detail, and I think the text did come out white, but I still really like it. I'm sure it'll come in handy for planning the mapping party too.

So after saying yesterday that I was going to continue doing the blog South West of Mather Avenue I ended up doing some more of Allerton today. Decided that I would pop down to Allerton road for lunch and realised that I'd missed some roads off Storrsdale road so I went down that way, I then continued across Rose lane onto Bridge road and followed the train line up to Penny Lane. Nice enough cycle, not too far out of my way, and picked up a few more roads. I'll probably go out in the car tomorrow and do a bit more of my intended area, probably more towards Jericho lane.

Thought I'd investigate this diary thing...

This week I've been doing a few things OSM related. The first one was to try to organise a large printout of the current Liverpool coverage to use for planning the upcoming Liverpool Mapping Party. I used a dump of Liverpool data from Sunday (2007/10/21), tidied it up by removing some long straggling ways and converted it to SVG. I then loaded the SVG into Inkscape and played with it a bit before exporting a PNG. I sent these files off to my friend Thom Shannon who was going to get it printed out (on A0 paper!) Unfortunately as it turned out Thom's friend couldn't print out the dodgy Inkscape files so I had to do a new one yesterday using PDF. That has apparently worked and even gave me chance to include some changes I did on Monday and Tuesday :-)

Which leads onto the next thing, I've been trying to avoid mapping Allerton too much as I know there's at least one potential mapper there and I don't want to spoil his fun as he's more likely to get involved if he gets to map his own area. I'm struggling to find places close enough to my house to do within a lunch hour though so I decided to visit an area I'd already been but got a poor trace for. Marlcroft Drive which you should hopefully see on the map was, until recently, a straight line between Mersey Road and Riversdale Road. I cycled down it for the second time to get a better trace. Unfortunately I got another bad trace and had to go back a second time on Tuesday!.

On the way back from Marlcroft Drive, and on Tuesday I collected the last roads off Brodie Avenue (North West) and today I collected (hopefully) all the roads between Brodie Avenue and Mather Avenue (further North West). I'm going to aim to get the entire block between Mather Avenue, the river and Jericho Lane-Elmswood Road-Rose Lane now, should be able to do that in the next few days.

Final thing this week is that I'm going to be talking a little bit about the Liverpool Mapping Party at geekup (geekup.org). Hopefully I'll get everyone interested enough so that they'll come along to the party at the beginning of November. Thom will also be bringing along the A0 printout and we can start plannig which bits we'll try to get covered.