Serving as the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team’s Voting Membership Chairperson for the past year has been a privilege, a challenge, and a learning experience for me. I greatly appreciate that the Voting Membership elected me to this role last year, and I hope for the opportunity to continue serving in that role for the next year.

Serving in the role of Membership Chairperson for a second consecutive year will allow for consistency in the role in supporting the business of the Voting Membership. Starting off in the position, I faced, what I considered, a large learning curve. There was no shortage of, and I am thankful for all of the, support from Russell and Mikel (former Chairs), Board Members, Voting Members, and HOT Staff in my transition into the role. Understanding the procedural side of our organization was a larger lift than I had originally anticipated, but I have a new-found appreciation for our Bylaws and Robert’s Rules of Order.

Over the course of the last year we’ve been able to identify many strengths and opportunities for improvement within our Voting Membership. At the 2019 HOT Summit in Heidelberg, many of us had the opportunity to talk in person, setting aside time to talk through ideas for 2020. We conducted a survey of the membership, which resulted in a newly offered Voting Membership on-boarding session for new Voting Members.

There is much I would like to support the membership with this year, including identifying ways to improve our asynchronous collaboration, which in my opinion, would allow for more Voting Members to contribute. This includes identifying ways that our Voting Members can be more empowered at a local level to support HOT’s programs, including new efforts as a part of HOT’s Audacious Project.

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Hello OSM-US!

It was great to hear the news that Maggie Cawley will be serving as the Executive Director of OSM-US, I’m excited to see what ideas and energy she brings to the role. I’ve decided to run for the Board seat that Maggie vacated for a few reasons:

1. Under the leadership of our new ED, I want to help define the direction of OSM-US

2. OpenStreetMap has had a temendous impact on my career, and I want to give back in a positive manner to my local OSM community.

Who am I?

In my all day and all night job, I’m a father to two wonderful kids who are sick and tired of my dad jokes. I live with my family in Northern Virginia, but we’re all New Yorkers (upstate) at heart.

In my job that helps pay the bills, I work for Radiant Solutions, focusing on data quality and validation, something which in OSM, I care deeply about. My colleagues are only slightly tired of my dad jokes.

What do I map?

Here’s my HDYC page

I joined the OSM world in 2013 (if you want to see my first edits, I embarrassingly show them off in my SOTM-US talk in Detroit), mapping for the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team’s Typhoon Haiyan response. In two years working with the American Red Cross, I supported local volunteers, all over the world, mapping their communities, leading mapping initiatives in Canaan, Haiti and Binga, Zimbabwe.

As a member of HOT, I try to make time every week for validating and giving feedback to new mappers. Sometimes life gets in the way of mapping, but I’ve grown as a mapper due to my involvement with HOT and it’s community of volunteers.

Of course, here in the US, I typically enjoy mapping places I’ve lived. I’m mostly active in upstate New York where I grew up, but map in Western NY, Central Massachusetts, and in Northern Virginia. I’ve recently increased my participation collecting street level imagery for Mapillary, which (at some point) I’ll get around to adding more detail in my local area.

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It’s been quite a busy year for me, so hopefully it isn’t too tough to recall my mappy highlights for the year, but that could prove a challenge, given that I usually can’t remember if I’ve eaten on any given day.

Major Accomplishments

• In December of 2017 Dan Joseph and myself traveled to Canaan, Haiti to collect updated drone imagery on behalf of the American Red Cross to continue to update the map of the area. Since the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, this community has grown exponentially, and updated maps are critical to the community there. In the first part of 2018, we shared the imagery on OpenAerialMap and our workflow is highlighted on the Missing Maps Blog. You can contribute to some of these projects using the imagery at the HOT Tasking Manager
• While at the American Red Cross, I brought together a team of volunteers to focus on data quality for our Missing Maps projects in the HOT Tasking Manager. I presented at the April GeoDC meeting, highlighting some of their work, and after only a few short months, they had already contributed over 100k edits to OSM!
• Perhaps the biggest accomplishment for me on a professional level was switching jobs! I left my position at the American Red Cross, and while I certainly miss working with all the fantastically dedicated people there, I traded in my passport for a new, more local adventure (I didn’t actually trade in my passport, that would be wildly irresponsible of me).
• As a voting member of HOT I spent more time involved in some of the working groups. I had the privilege of working with other members of the HOT community on formulating the membership feedback to the organization’s strategic plan. It was an eye-opening and new experience for me, but it makes me all the more proud to be a part of this community!

Little wins

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Hello everyone, my name is Matthew Gibb and I appreciate the opportunity to be considered for the Board of Directors for the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team. For the past two and a half years I have been a member of the GIS team at the American Red Cross.

I vividly remember my first time mapping in OpenStreetMap. Typhoon Haiyan had just made landfall in the Philippines and a colleague in grad school introduced several of us to HOT and the Tasking Manager. She got us set up with JOSM, taught us how to map, and you might say the rest was history. Alas, it was not. It was probably another year before I mapped again, and then another six months before I started mapping my hometown and surrounding areas consistently on my own.

Having worked previously in disaster response domestically in the US, I was accustomed to having all the GIS data I needed, from federal to state to local level. It wasn’t until joining the American Red Cross that I was able to see first-hand the incredible impact that this community has in disaster response and engagement of local communities throughout the world. Through our work with the Missing Maps project, I’ve had the benefit of working with volunteers, literally putting their community on the map, and often times creating a perspective for their community that they did not have before.

My own adventure in joining HOT is a long way from a Pulitzer-worthy story for sure, but it has shaped how I believe I can continue to contribute to HOT as a member of the board:

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