Rather too soon after all the excitement of State Of The Map, we had a London mapping evening in Charing Cross. No time to take a breather. It was back to the mapping.

Well for me at least. I wanted to try and plug another gap in the buildings, so the cake diagram was around Charing Cross / Covent Garden area, and I filled in a chunk of buildings there:

The Covent Garden area is POI central, and although we have quite a few things mapped, it became clear to me that Osmarender should be a whole lot more cluttered. There's a bazillion missing restaurants and bars. All we need is a decent pub in the area. That unfortunately is a bit of a problem. It's generally way too crowded and touristy for mapping meet-up pubs. Tom had a suggestion though. The Theodore Bullfrog was pretty good

In the pub Grant brought along an extra South African, and together they hatched a plot to release some out of copyright maps of South Africa. kiff bru! (?)

We also chatted with Grant about hardware. He needs to ask for more money from the foundation, which may mean the foundation asking for more money as a donation drive. We all agreed he should go for it, and think big!

We had along GravityStorm and housemate Randomjunk (DWG undercover investigator) We talked about tile serving and we talked about Potlatch 2 development. Potlatch 2 was unleashed onto the live data as an alpha testing release, as an announcement at the conference (go try it out!) but development is ongoing of course. Andy Allan made no attempt to deny plans for an OpenCycleMap.org Potlatch 2 deployment, a customised version of the editor, simplified specifically for editing of cycle features.

We talked about non-geolocated objects in the database; relations with tags but only containing other relations, or even just ways containing no nodes. Mysterious dark matter which matches no bounding box query as it has no location. Anyone know how much of this there is? I assume this is all mistakes or editor/import glitches, which should be deleted, rather than people actually trying to store meaningful data which has no location. Please tell me nobody's doing that.

One major problem with the Theodore Bullfrog (aside from the very pants website map. Use an inferior map like everyone else if you want, but at least put the marker in the right place! (It's been fixed since I wrote this) ) was that they stopped serving food at 8pm. Since we were set to arrive then, we missed it. A meal at wagammas hit the spot quite nicely though.

It was a fun night, and as I say, we'll have to go back to this pub to map some more POIs in the area. I was so distracted by the conversations, I forgot to take any photos!

The next London Mapping Party will be next Saturday 31st, as a quick session in the morning followed by a BBQ! Come along!