Chidlow
· OpenStreetMap ·
Another social mapping Sunday, for the first time heading out of the city. Mappers aggregated at a couple of railway stations in order to carpool for the hour's drive up to the Lake. The BOM were warning about thunderstorms, but the morning dawned sunny (although humid and with dark clouds), and then Transperth notified of train delays (the alert I read over breakfast and it caused me to rush out earlier then I would've). But all was well in the end.
It was a lovely cool weather when we got there at about half ten, fresh after the morning's rain. First order of business was coffees from the café — with which we sat on a damp picnic table and figured out the order of the day. Apps were installed and mapping techniques discussed. We sorted out who was going to map what sort of things and where, and split up to do so. I headed off on my own to investigate the area below the dam wall, where there's a BMX track, dam spillway, and various other things (including wooden power poles! although I'm not sure anyone else is as excited about those as I am).
I started my mapping in Vespucci, but then realised that it'd logged me out at some point, and because I wanted to keep uploading things in small batches (to avoid conflicts later) I gave up and went back to my current favourite of Every Door. The available imagery of the lake area isn't great, and even if it was higher-resolution it would still be pretty annoying because of all the tree cover. I also trialled using OsmAnd's photo note feature, and tried the thing of putting the photo notes in the location of the photo subject rather than the camera location — this feels a bit odd to me, and in the end the share functionality utterly failed me and I had to resort to sharing each individual photo out to get them into Nextcloud. So not a good experiment.
Some people were using pen and paper, which is something that I want to look into more (perhaps with a custom rendering for print). I also experimented with KartaView, and added a couple of segments of a about a dozen photos each. I'm not sure it's really worthwhile considering the social awkwardness of walking along holding a camera up; the results would be similar if I just took individual photos of features that need to be mapped.
At about half twelve we regrouped and headed into Chidlow for lunch.
Another visit would no doubt be useful to improve and correct things that we mapped, but all up it was a terrific and mappingly-useful day. The point of these outings is as much social as technical, and it was terrific from that point of view. I'm looking forward to the next outing.
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