Just got back from Birmingham

I had a great time, thanks to all involved in the organisation.

What did I learn:

First we should do more the build the community. Both in terms of numbers and diversity. Communication with community is not easy, mailing list are not working. OSM is not unique in this. We need to make becoming a mapper easier. We need more getting started guides and the wiki needs work. I don’t think my skills are best used in writing guides, but I will try to improve the wiki.

The work being done in the ‘developing’ world is fantastic. I hope I can find time to help. I think some of the work being done there should be imported into the first world to help us build our local communities.

The technology behind the map is great. What I would like to work on is on rendering styles. I think the users should be given a bigger choice of rendering styles, I think this will depend rendering in the browser. I think this will allow users to create their own maps but using the common data. This I think we encourage more mappers and mapping. One speaker said that new users want quick feed back for their edits. Having more rendering options would make this easier.