“Getting Started with OpenStreetMap”

We have a special meeting in June with a special presentation from Ben Proctor on Open Street Map. We have booked a meeting room at St John’s Ambulance, Widemarsh St, Hereford HR4 9HN on Tuesday 25th June 2013 at starting 7.30pm with a 9pm finish. Please note as we have had to hire the room there will be a small charge to attend this event. We hope to get as many old and new members and newcomers along to this exciting event.

OpenStreetMap is sometimes called Wikipedia for maps. It is a vast, remarkably accurate and powerful database of global mapping information provided by volunteers and free for anyone to use.

I hope to give you a quick overview of how it works. How easy it is to edit. Why you would bother to edit it and ways in which the maps have been and will continue to be useful. I hope it will be fairly practical and if people bring laptops they should be able to get editing the map straight away.

My hope is that you’ll get a sense of how easy it is to get started and to make use of the mapping data. This is an overview and hopefully some pointers to get you started. However if you have experience using OpenStreetMap it would be great to have you there to share your experience.

If we have time maybe we can touch on some open source GIS tools and other open mapping projects like Ushahidi (which is a tool I’ve used for a few projects).

I am aware that some LUGs have embraced open mapping and that in some areas pub crawls are combined with mapping in a useful and enjoyable way. Maybe some people will want to take this further. No pressure.

You may want to sign up for an OpenStreetMap account now. You never know when you’ll need it

Special note for Linux folk:

OpenStreetMap is an open data project and the tools to edit it are available for many OS’s. If you want to try some editing on the night you’ll need a browser that is comfortable running lots of funky javascript and you’ll need an up to date java environment installed. If you fancy you can install JOSM. There is an Ubuntu repository.