Open Street Map Party in Sheffield

On Saturday and Sunday I attended the Sheffield Open Street Map party. All this is pretty new to me but I was certainly interested in the concept of creating a free and openly editable map of the world. The party was kindly hosted and organised by the IET and ShefLUG in cooperation with the OSM guys who brought along some GPS gear for those of us who don’t have our own.

We got a crash course on how to use the handheld GPS devices and then went out to do some mapping. I partnered up with Dan on Saturday and we wandered around the back streets quite close to the Mappin building which was our base. We took it in turns making notes and using the GPS and I think we managed to map just about every street in the patch we covered as well as quite a few footpaths.

Above is a copy of the OSM map of Sheffield as it stands right now after some of our weekends work has been added. It still hasn't rebuilt the tiles with the extra bits I have just added but I am sure it will get on there soon. I really enjoyed doing the mapping and hope to do more in the future. There are so many good reasons to help out with this project if you can.

Marble is planning on adding support for OSM, it is also a great way to do something pretty geeky and get out of the office for a while I love the freedom it gives you to add data, correct mistakes and use the data for whatever you like. Personally I am thinking of adding dive sites as I go to them and using Marble to display all the sites I have been to. I could also use it to map out runs and check on my performance as I train.