HOT members - welcome to the 2021 election cycle! If you’ve been considering running for a board seat, or simply my informal take on things, read on!

This year, we have several unique factors at play:

• HOT has just entered (as of July) its second year of implementation of Audacious Project implementation, working toward a goal of engaging 1 million contributors to map an area home to 1 billion people across 94 countries.
• The organization has gone through a period of rapid change in the past 12 months, opening two regional hubs, adding roughly 45 staff members, doubling our annual budget, and putting the organizational foundations in place to dramatically scale up community support. We’ll continue to scale from 2021-22.
• The environment around us has also changed dramatically, opening up new possibilities with recent technical advances and forcing us to re-think ways of working under Covid-related movement restrictions.
• Lots more has been happening: see our Annual Report (I’ll write more on where we stand and where we’re heading next month).
• Amidst all of this, five of seven board seats are up for grabs.

I’ve been reflecting on this. As someone who works to serve and expand the open mapping / OpenStreetMap movement every day, what would position HOT in the best way to support the movement? Given the changes and uncertainty, what specific skills would add the most value? What specifically do we need coming out of this year’s Board of Directors election cycle?

I’ve come up with a rough grouping of skills and experiences that have the potential to add significant value as part of HOT’s Board of Directors. HOT has an incredible diversity of lived experiences in our membership, though, so if you don’t see your particular experience here, it doesn’t mean it wouldn’t benefit HOT.

In no particular order, here’s my top five archetypes:

The serial entrepreneur or tech trend-setter

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It is a privilege to address 2020’s humanitarian OpenStreetMap Summit today. This year marks HOT’s 10th anniversary, and my own 5th anniversary with HOT starting from 2015. Today’s theme is the past, present and future of humanitarian OpenStreetMap and we have been thinking a lot about the future.

I wanted to share my Summit address (which you can watch here) on an OSM diary simultaneously, so that people can engage in the comments if they want to.

This is something of a statement of intent for HOT within the humanitarian and OpenStreetMap ecosystems and, while it has been shaped by many conversations with community groups, collaborators and contributors in the universe in which HOT exists, it only seeks to represent my own perspective and some of the recent thinking within HOT the NGO. Please think of it as an early draft and a contribution to a conversation.

I also acknowledge that HOT’s presentation of itself has increasingly highlighted our successes while smoothing over or not acknowledging challenges and failures. Today’s Summit features “failfest” sessions for the first time where friends and colleagues are sharing learnings from where they didn’t necessarily get it right. This statement is not about what we’ve gotten right, but about how we’d like to embrace a stronger culture of feedback and learning and hope that, by doing so, we can achieve great things, with all of you.

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