Some people remember their youth fondly. I can't imagine why. You have to steal your own Halloween candy, and your peers poo their pants for no good reason. And anyone who thinks of their teenage years as a golden time has forgotten the indignity of being old enough to get drafted but too young to boff your hot science teacher. No, I thank my lucky stars I'm a withered, sagging, 26-year-old with the legal right to drink until the world is nothing but a blur of puke-spattered shoes. Which, as I told the officer, is an excellent reason to poo one's pants.

But now there's a less generic, more geekily-productive way to try to get arrested. From the wonderful people behind OpenStreetMap, the editable, user-driven world map and geological database, comes the Mapping Party, a new phenomenon in nerdutainment. All around the world, FOSS enthusiasts are taking to the streets with portable GPS devices, mapping their local areas, and adding that information to OpenStreetMap's ever-evolving system.

For Berlin-based Hanno Bock, a German computer science student and volunteer OpenStreetMap organizer, mapping parties are the perfect blend of open source advocacy and cartographic rabble rousing. "I was always fascinated by the idea of free software and especially the idea of bringing those principals to other areas. So when I heard of OpenStreetMap [for] the first time, I thought it may be quite interesting. Although I didn't [know if the project would be a success] when it started, it was a lot of fun." And after his first mapping party in the little town of Aspach, Bock was hooked.

At a mapping party, GPS devices are set to log the party's current location often and regularly, usually once per second or every two seconds. As the group roves down one street and up another, the devices keep track of their path and save the data for later upload to the OpenStreetMap milieu.

High tech, yes. But expensive, no. Bock, for example, uses his Bluetooth-enabled mobile phone with java / j2me. "I have a cheap external Bluetooth GPS device and the software Mobile Trail Explorer on my phone. I also take a camera with me. With the timestamp from the mapping data and the camera, I can assign ... images to the place I took them. So I don't have to write anything down."

The one obvious drawback of planning a mapping party is that there is no easy-peasy way to find out which areas still need mapping, which are inaccurate, and which are complete, and so avid OpenStreetMappers have all developed their own ways of deciding which locations to tackle. Bock says he finds new locations mostly by accident. "[I use] the map often, so I notice if something doesn't match the real world."

But even if every back alley in your neighborhood has already been entered into the database, elevation and street info are not the only types of data OpenStreetMap accepts. One of the real beauties of the project is that it's a bit like a geographical doppleganger, transforming to suit each user with layers upon layers of data and data types. You can create (or find) a map of bike trails or incorporate a mapping party into your next bar crawl. Even small, simple additions, like sketching out the shape and boundaries of a local strip mall parking lot, make OpenStreetMap that much more robust.

Not that it's not pretty brawny already. With over 160,000 registered users in the OSM system, it's looking more and more likely that this project will overtake mapping giants the likes of Google Earth and Yahoo Maps. In fact, in some areas, it already has. OpenStreetMap users report that the project now contains more data on Romania than GE.

Another great thing about OpenStreetMap, Bock says, is that "you can do [what you want] with the data, and are not restricted to the rules of any commercial company. You get the raw data, ... so you can build your own applications around OpenStreetMap. And if you think the data quality is not good enough, you can help improve it." 

Doing that, Bock assures me, is no big deal. His advice? "Try to bring experienced people together with beginners, and announce your party to the local press, so more people know there is something like OpenStreetMap."

Check the OSM Events Calendar or the C-T Open Source Events Directory to join a mapping party near you.