This diary post is to inform HOT voting members that don’t know me or want to know more about why I’m running for the HOT board.

Coming from an OSM background (and not a humanitarian one) I believe HOT should keep focus on it’s community. Having a healthy diverse community ensures HOT stays closer to a grassroots organization. A community enforces an organization in ways we don’t appreciate enough sometimes.

As a first step to make this happen we need to better define what being a HOT voting member means. For me this means I have 2 main tasks:
- The governance of HOT, voting and checking up on the board and staff. The public board meetings have improved a lot here already and more information about what HOT staff is doing can help improve this even further.
- Setting the direction for HOT for the future. What should HOT focus on? I think that should come from the membership. Initiatives like the strategy work group are something I support.

I’ve always assumed being a member is about these two things. For anything else there is no need to be a member. I think we need to distinguish between the HOT membership, that is meant to govern HOT together with the board, and the wider community. You don’t need to be a HOT voting member to be a valued part of the HOT community. Perhaps we can do with less, but more active members, more focused on their task, and a wider and more open & active community around that.

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At the company that I work for at the moment I'm involved in a project to use OpenStreetMap (OSM) data for implementing mapping and routing services.

Up to this point we implemented several useful OMS-tools in a C# library. C# is the language and .NET is the framework used at this company.

But yesterday, for the fist time, we got some first feedback from the users in the field to update the actual maps. To optimize delivery rounds users sometimes go into the field to write down the housenumbers for entire streets. The way addresses can be located in the system can be optimized. This is an excellent way to provide feedback of useful information to OSM and in a way contribute back to the project and the data we are using. They also take a GPS-tracing device (GT-31) so adding the streets they visited can also be done.

About the licence; I have a signed consent form stating that changes can be made to OSM based on the information gathered by the employees here!

www.14k.be