Help me decide the place for the next meeting

I already blogged about how awful a weekend this is. However, OpenStreetMap has always been a crowdsourced effort so YOU, my fellow minions contributors, and only YOU, are the ones who should have a say in how the OSM foundation meets. In the end, we're here to spend the sponsor's money serve the community.

In an effort to crowdsource our meetings (and avoid awful places like this hellhole) I've decided that YOU should set the place for our next meeting. And don't say we don't give you a voice on how to run things because I'm a benevolent dictator after all. I have pre-selected a few places from which you can choose:






If you can't see a way to vote, don't worry. I will shortly select a Collaborative Social Voting Web 3.5 application for your iPads. I mean, I know a thing or two about this, so the one I choose will be blessed with my wisdom and become the next big thing in voting. Maybe also the next big thing in feeding starving children. I mean, I have to do something about so many italians not eating proper caviar.

This flooding is awful

I hope Mikel is bringing some of his Rescue Rangers with him. And a Garmin-to-gondola adapter. How does anybody map under these conditions?

Couldn't Simone have picked a board meeting location that wasn't suffering a flood emergency? I swear to God I thought he said "Pizza" and was talking about the catering. Oh, for the good old days when nobody on my Ministry of Truth had an accent.

I’m working at Microsoft and we’re donating imagery to OpenStreetMap!

There's Nothing to See Here, Please Move Along Now

OSM not always better

So I’m getting some stick over the fact my modestly titled wedding invitation directed people to the venue with Google Maps... not OSM.

Let me spell it out for you.

Already I have to cope with you freaky stalker guys circulating photos of my stag night.

Now let’s say I use an OSM link for my wedding invite. First up, someone would claim that share-alike means you’re all invited to the wedding. Then they’d have a vote on the wiki and decide to rebrand the happy day as a nuptial mapping party (2pm: wedding service. 2.30pm: mapping party. 9pm: drinks with mandatory tagging discussion.) All the guests would be two hours late because some joker would have edited the connecting roads to lead to Denver’s red light district. Finally, someone would sneak in to the reception just to check whether the best man’s speech gives compliant attribution to OSM, and would heckle if it didn’t. Loudly. In German.

You think I’m kidding? Seriously, trouble-makers like you guys are why I need a branding iron in the shape of my initials.

That humanitarian stuff Mikel is always on about is nice.

I'll have my people send him the used Garmins from the Community Team once we get back to port. "More foie gras, garçon"



How does advertising look now, hippies?

If you have a problem

...if no-one else can help

...and if you can find them

maybe you can hire...

the OpenStreetMap Foundation's Assassination Working Group.

Featuring Howling Matt Amos

(Hannibal's real name is John Smith. Just saying)

Skobbler launches in the US using OSM data and CloudMade routing

Mappers are expendable

So as anyone who follows my Dopplr will know, I have a punishing travel schedule and typically circumnavigate the world three times in any given week. There’s just one reason for that - I’m spreading the word about OSM.

Actually there used to be two reasons. I used to put a GPS in the window (Business Class, natch. Thanks VC guys) and then ‘encourage’ the pilots to trace ground features. Unfortunately that had to stop after the episode where I asked them to do a couple of flypasts of the outline of the Pentagon and in fact I haven't been allowed back on American Airlines since.

Now many of you, my disciples, will have heard me talk about OSM. Wherever I am, you'll know there is one word I mention a lot in my talks. Community. Community. The C in SteveC doesn’t stand for Community but it should. Community, Community, Community. I’m a bit like Steve Ballmer in the Developers speech but without the sweaty armpits.

Listen to that word carefully. Community.

Not ‘mappers’.

TeleAtlas have mappers with their Map Insight thing, but they don’t have a community. Google have mappers, but they don’t have a community. Wikimapia have mappers, but not a community or even a licence, though they do have awsome moustaches and a song. And People’s Map don’t have mappers or a community but they do of course have beards.

So we’re the only ones with a community and that’s why we succeed.

So that means the community is more important than any single mapper. If you, as a single mapper, are endangering the community, we can’t afford to keep you. We have over 200,000 mappers now, we won’t miss one or two. I know this sounds a bit like socialism but I like to think of it as the market overcoming obstacles, or 'community libertarianism'. More on that in my forthcoming book 'Thoughts of Chairman Steve'.

Community is everything. For example Potlatch doesn’t have a development community which is why I keep bellyaching about it. Currently it has only one developer and 50,000 users. It would be much better if it were more like Mapzen which has 50,000 developers and one user.

So in August this guy Anthony arrived and has since proceeded to crap all over our mailing lists at extremely high volume. The talk list now comprises Anthony and five mad Aussies and everyone else has fucked off in desperation.

Anthony has a bit of a track record of fucking up communities and, in particular, of following his own pig-headed opinions on copyright no matter what anyone else thinks. Now he’s determined to do the same on OSM.

Mappers are expendable. Community is everything. 20 pages of tiny edits do not give you the right to ignore the community. The hive mind of OSM has not disappointed me yet. Go to it, disciples.

Shitholes

So that smart Muti guy has figured that OSM has crap mapping for crap towns. We are 90% complete for London and 275% complete for Karlsruhe but when it comes to some town up north beginning with N, our mappers don’t even go there, sister.



Although we have at least put the railway station on the railway line rather than, for example, 750m offshore. Well done on that one, Ed. Also we don’t have a completely bogus motorway to the south.

Personally I don’t see why we need to map places where noone wants to go - it sounds like Schrodinger’s PND to me.

But maybe I can explain why “the gap between affluent and deprived LSOAs is growing”, which Nick translates for me as “the percentage of shitholes in OSM is going down”.

Back in the day we had mapping parties and all the old-school crowd turned up. We spent the day cycling around shitholes and dropping Gekos (remember them?) onto concrete. Then we came back to some room for which we had lost the key, spent two hours trying to upload the first node to the API, then went to the pub.

These days all the old-school crowd have got girlfriends, or spend all their time writing Fake blogs, or have been made redundant so can’t afford to travel to mapping parties any more. So we don’t have parties any more (look if you don’t believe me).

But, we figure, we have 10,000 new mappers per day (PR guy please check stats, thanks) so we don’t need parties.

Actually all the new mappers are still middle-class geeks who want to map their neighbourhood. It's rare that you find a rags-to-riches hero like me who has made their way up from the mean streets of Surrey. So the shitholes no longer get mapped.

Let’s make 2010 the Year of the Shithole Mapping Party and git those crap towns mapped. Or maybe we could wait until April and just lift the Ordnance Survey’s data. Tough call.