Talk:Santa Clara County, California

San Jose city boundaries and annexations

We just got some sort of import of city boundaries, or something to that effect. The problem in San Jose is that they've been annexing a lot of the little leftover snippets. I spotted two which I recognized right off, but there are more that have happened recently (and more are pending). For more information, see attached link. -Fennecfoxen 02:10, 15 April 2009 (UTC)

• http://www.sanjoseca.gov/planning/annex/

Mapping parties post-Ambassadors?

Though I live in the East Bay, I wonder what we'd do for equipment for those who don't have GPS gear (or laptops)?

User:Davetoo 04:26, 17 May 2010 (edit) (undo)

It would be really great if you could figure out a new format for mapping parties there. I hate the idea that mapping parties were dependant on CloudMade ambassadors. If you have enough interested people in the area, then you should be able to get together and make a successful OpenStreetMap event, and it will be all the better for the fact that nobody's paid to be there.

I can tell you what we do in London, but I don't know if this format will work well for you. We mostly just have a regular evening pub get-together, on a week-day evening, with a hour or so of mapping before we meet at the pub. We have a 'cake diagram' on the wiki, and sign-up list to avoid people mapping the same area, but we don't actually meet until after doing the mapping. The only exception is if I get contacted by someone who wants to learn about it. Then I'll go meet them and take them mapping with me. Some people just skip the mapping and head straight to the pub. At the pub we just socialise. We don't generally get laptops out at all. People input their data later on in the week.

If you tend to get large numbers of newbies coming along (unfortunately we don't), then you'd need to meet beforehand I guess. You don't particularly need GPS gear though. A lot of people find playing with GPS gadgets to be an attraction of OpenStreetMap, but the truth is you don't need it all. Paper-based mapping can work just fine. E.g. use Walking Papers printouts to give people different areas to map. For newbies you might want to have a few laptops to use for teaching them how to input their data.

There's some cultural differences though. I'd be interested to know how it goes there!

-- Harry Wood 12:58, 17 May 2010 (UTC)

I think we did have a very high ratio of newbies in the few events that I was able to attend, but I agree that there is a lot of footwork to be done validating/supplementing the existing data--which wouldn't necessarily require a gps unit. At the moment, though, what I think we need more than feet on the ground is some coordination/discussion amongst the active mappers/hackers in the area; I think we should be asking ourselves "What can we do, and in what order, to provide the maximum benefit to the non-technical users of this data (i.e. the main map displays)?". For example, not much of the TIGER data has been validated/cleaned.

However, I think that's outside the scope of this present discussion. I think I need to spend some time looking at WalkingPapers and put some thought into a template for an efficient, effective social+mapping event.

--Davetoo 02:35, 20 May 2010 (UTC)