We had our OpenStreetMap Christmas Party in the Blue Posts pub near Oxford Street. It turns out that after work on a Christmas shopping Friday, this pub is rather busy. Even in the sneakily hidden upstairs area, we weren't going to get a table any time soon. And there was quite a few of us there, all celebrating OpenStreetMappy Christmas, plus a few other friends of mine in the pub at same time too.

With all this going on, I wasn't taking minutes of the meeting, but there was definitely a few interesting conversations going on.

Steve8 was there, and as a follow up to his comments at the last meet-up, he confirmed he is going ahead with getting the rest of his 7th Series collection scanned, with a bit of help from James Rutter (GIS cheif at Surrey Heath council) So that's great news.

Nick Black was there along with Yuliya Leonova from CloudMade. Good to see them representing. Nick was telling me that CloudMade's javascriptmeister Vladimir Agafonkin has come up with a HTML5 web maps library. Guess we can expect this to be appearing as part of the "Web Maps API" or a seperate part of Web Maps Studio. Nick was saying it works rather well on mobile devices. But HTML5 still only works for about 50% of web users (using better browser software). Maybe this is why existing HTML5 map libraries like polymaps don't seem to be much used (so far at least). We also speculated about client-side rendering. It's the future! Speaking of which...

Mr trackmyjourney.co.uk, was there. I got him to show off his prototype 3D stuff. He's reluctant to include it in the app (because he's run out of space on all his menus to be adding new features!), but it's really rather neat. This is using contours from OS OpenData:

There were several waves of people heading to the burritos shop, but towards the end of the night we had another culinary treat. Derick unveiled his gingerbread map! :

Hopefully other OpenStreetMap Christmas parties in Toronto, Bremen, Grenoble, and Belo Horizonte had as much christmasy fun as we had, but you can be sure they didn't have a gingerbread map!

There may be another London OpenStreetMap meet-up before Christmas, or maybe the next one will be in the near year (watch the wiki page, and @OSMLondon.