10 years + a few days ago, we held the White House Mapathon.

https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2015/05/28/citizen-cartographers-unite-report-first-white-house-mapathon

Over a hundred mappers gathered and livestreamed the happenings, shared stories of cool mapping projects, dialed in Peace Corps volunteers from the across the globe, and naturally mapped. There were cake pops decorated like globes. Along the walls, stunning reproductions of historic American maps provided by the Archives (I snagged a couple prints, they hang in my office to this day). Everyone dressed formal for the setting, except Alex Barth in usual attire, commenting “Wow OpenStreetMap is fancy today”.

Can you imagine that occurring today? Unimaginable. Of course not.

These kinds of convenings are by their nature fleeting. A recognition and shared touchstone for future work. Yes a bit hype-y, but grounded in real work and real opportunity. This was the era of upswing in open government, open data, the early days of 18F and USDS. The community that gathered there continued championing open mapping in the years after. Some of the most enduring are YouthMappers https://www.youthmappers.org/ and OSM US government initiatives https://openstreetmap.us/our-work/trails/.

We’re now in the age of BS. Truth or not does not matter. That comes from government and AI vibes.

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I want to use Overture Places to improve OSM, and want to share a few ideas on that.

First the data is worldwide, and there’s definitely added value there to mine. Here’s Brandon Liu’s map over Santo Domingo.

However it’s a mixed bag. Adjusting confidence score is helpful. But even then, some things are in right location, some are already in OSM, some are closed, or miscategorized. It takes careful analysis to find places that could added to OSM. Wille did a great job examining his local area

This is not a harsh critique – it’s tough data to manage. There’s value. I’d like a workflow that gets at deriving that value, fast. I think it’s a combination of something that enables the kind of analysis Wille did, along with an easy way to edit OSM.

I don’t think this needs to have a fancy entity matching process between Overture and OSM. Choose an area. Generate a list of features in Overture, with confidence threshold, and filtered to feature classes of interest. Show both Overture and OSM on the map. Work down the list, examine the map, take an action in OSM if necessary (adding, updating, or nothing), then mark the task with the action.

I guess this could be done through MapRoulette? Though tasks there seem typically driven by analysis of OSM objects, not 3rd party data to conflate. RapID? Not possible to create your own tasks. What about adding Overture as an overlay in iD? Another way?

Yesterday I gave a keynote talk to State of the Map Nigeria in Abuja. Despite numerous technical difficulties (I think I was on a phone giving the talk within a big room?!), I hope I got some ideas across to at least one person who needed to hear them.

I decided to focus my talk on what it’s taken to feel accomplished in OpenStreetMap. And I do, so much personal and professional success has come from being a part of this community. It broke down to 9 points.

Up front I acknowledged Connection. It still feels like a miracle that I could talk from Santo Domingo to the Obasanjo Space Centre. When I was growing up, this was pure science fiction. Today we can connect with nearly anyone in the world. The power of this can not be overstated, and is not nearly leveraged enough. It’s the essential piece of what makes OSM works in my opinion.

Next Inspiration. Have a problem that moves you. You don’t need to know the solution up front, that takes time. Figure out how data and community apply. I started working on the idea of HOT after the Indian Ocean tsunami, and Hurricane Katrina. Disaster response is extremely hard, but it seemed like information flow about place could be a solved problem.

Translation is a powerful position to be in, sitting between two worlds and helping them to talk to each other. I don’t mean linguistic necessarily, but conceptual. HOT sits within two places that operate very differently – humanitarian and open source. In the OSMF, I’ve been working to help organizations and community better understand each other.

Commitment is essential. Working on hard problems takes years, at minimum. Map Kibera had a great map in OSM within weeks. But it took years until there was a direct benefit in Kibera. We could have celebrated in 2009 (and we did) but so what – we couldn’t stop there. I didn’t consider any solid impact until 2013, at the next presidential election, where the map became essential for the operation and participation.

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2022 Board elections are coming up for OSMF. You can see what the details will be like on the wiki page from last year. There are three seats up for election, not clear yet who from current Board members will run again.

We need people to run who are focused on specific needs, and ready to put in professional level work on a volunteer basis. In other words, folks who can pick a 1 or 2 things, do good work on them, in service to our community. There are plenty of chunky problems that need ownership.

Me, I’ve been on the OSMF Board longer than anyone. I used to try to cover everything. Now my work in OSMF is very focused on 2 areas – personnel and fundraising. We need to look after our people and make OSMF a good place to work. And we need resources to make our plans happen. It’s a lot, but I’m limiting my time to these.

There’s a lot of noise and energy around any election, and that holds pretty true for OSMF. It’s the one time of year many think about the OSMF at all. But the real work happens in the rest of the year. Very little of the campaign manifestos really matter. Opinions and positions don’t really matter. Through strategic discussion, we largely agree on what needs to get done. Doing the work is what counts, and that’s what we need in Board candidates.

Jumping directly into the OSMF Board with no prior OSMF experience is hard. There’s lots to do on Working Groups and Committees throughout the year. Helps build reputation across our global community, and familiarity with how we function.

That said, whatever your experience, if you are ready to jump and put in the work, I’d love to support you. Reach out and we can talk. I can share my insights on the process and what it takes.

Are you part of a local chapter, or a local community, putting together an organized project, or developing software? We’d love to hear from you at the OSMF Board meetings. Please get in touch with us or comment on this post.

Over a year ago, the OSMF Board began inviting Local Chapters to present at our monthly Board meetings. It has been consistently great to hear about OSM activities around the world directly from the people involved. Very useful for the Board and those keenly interested in Foundation governance to get as full a picture as possible. Thank you to OpenStreetMap Italia, OpenStreetMap á Íslandi, OpenStreetMap France, FOSSGIS, FLOSSK, OSM Ireland, and OSM UK!

We realized there’s more voices we could hear from, and over the past two months, have opened the door to any OSM community and other projects like software development.

In May, Jochen Topf shared his experiences developing key pieces of the OSM software ecosystem. And this month, Feye Andal shared work across the incredible OSM-PH community. Next month, we have Sarah Hoffman coming to talk about nominatim!

There is so much happening across our amazing community. For the Board and others involved in core governance in OSMF, we want to have this front and center to our efforts. We appreciate the time everyone has spent to share their work with us, and encourage everyone else to signal your interest!

We assessed where we are and got a lot of good work OSMF Board Screen to Screen a couple weeks ago. One place where we have not moved as much as hoped is with diversity and inclusion. Diversity and inclusion was a big topic at the start of this year’s Board, we adopted a diversity statement and started a diversity and inclusion special committee (DISC) which had a couple good meetings. Then nothing. Why and what can be done to revitalize?

I take personal responsibility. I organized the first two meetings, but was hoping to see someone else step up to take charge on the effort. My background – white male techie from US/Western Europe – is very well represented in the OSMF, and I didn’t think it was best for the DISC to have me as the chair. On reflection, that was wrong, and I should take up the effort to bring dedicated people together and make sure they have what they need to channel limited time and energy effectively.

So I want to do three things.

First, I want to have calls with people from underrepresented groups and geographies in OSMF, hear about your involvement in OSM, what you’d like to do in OSM and OSMF (and certainly not only on diversity directly), and offer my guidance and help to find good places to contribute. OSM is hard to navigate, and I want to make direct personal effort. Many of you I have the privilege to know, many not yet. Please get in touch with me, or share my contacts with folks others.

Second, I want to revitalize DISC and simply chair it. To make it vital is again going to take personal outreach to people who have been involved, or could be involved, and find the best places again to focus. One area I think we should take up is trust and safety in our online communication spaces.

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Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team develops on a 5 year cycle. From 2005-2010, HOT was a crazy idea within the crazy idea of OpenStreetMap. From 2010-2015, HOT showed that the use of OSM in humanitarian response was a viable idea, we built an organization and operations and tools, and weathered some chaos as an organization growing out of a community project. At this point in 2015, I recognized the 5 year pattern in my HOT Summit talk An Incomplete History of HOT. That’s where I first met HOT’s Executive Director, Tyler Radford, who from 2015-2020 stabilized and grew HOT in a well structured way. Confidence in this foundation has led to the Audacious grant to expand OSM community centered mapping from 2020-2025. I am very excited and very much want this to succeed wildly.

This is HOT’s most difficult transition. A well structured organization has a lot of momentum, and the intention of the next 5 years looks very different from the previous 5 years. HOT has focused on project work, building up staff, and delivering on specific commitments. All of which is great. But this naturally generates friction with community centered approaches, and I think HOT’s relationship to OSM has suffered because of lack of investment in the community and consistent data quality, and a disregard for the responsibility of HOT to engage in both the good and bad of OSM. It also means working for to contribute the many positive things in HOT’s work and culture to OSM at large. By “investment” I don’t focus on money, but on the time to build relationships, and use, support & develop processes to make OSM better. However, when operating at the scale of HOT, community effort needs to be resourced and part of the plan. I made this point in my HOT Summit 2019 talk Data, Operational Excellence and HOT.

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At the first meeting of the new OSMF Board, we discussed forming a Diversity Working Group, and I was charged to draft a scope of work. I appreciate the opportunity to take up the task to help get this effort moving. It’s fair to say that we all want participation in OpenStreetMap and the Foundation to be more representative of the whole of OSM and the world we want to map. This post sketches my thoughts on how we got here, and what this could look like. I’d love feedback. After some period of discussion, I’ll help organize a meeting (or set of meetings to accommodate time zones) to kick things off.

As background, the topic of diversity has been active for a long time in OpenStreetMap, in posts and mailing lists, including the dedicated diversity-talk@ list, discussed in Board election statements and QA for several years and at Board face to face meetings, and in person sessions at State of the Map. This year’s Board election of all white men from Europe and North America prompted active discussion across Twitter, OSM Diaries, and within the board email group. This discussion was at times difficult, and other times was productive. It became clear to me that there is a wide range of impression on what we all mean by “diversity”, the degree to which it’s a problem, if things should change, and how that change might be accomplished.

These discussions provide us with a broad set of topics to start thinking about an OSMF working group. I find it daunting, but at the same time we are provided with much to reflect on and work through on the topic of diversity. As the OSMF board, we are in a position to help the community channel these discussions into productive, impactful, data-driven and community oriented group. Structurally, this could take the form of a full working group, a working group with a time delimited lifespan, or a Board committee.

Here’s a proposal for questions the group might address

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“Governance” are the key rules and processes by which an organization functions. Setting the structure is one of the primary responsibilities of the Board, and in the long run where Board work has the most impact. It’s top of mind for me for the future of OSMF. I think a lot of the churn in OSMF can be settled by having better processes. This is not about centralized control, actually quite the opposite. I talk about this in my Board candidate statement and Q/A, but it’s kind of buried. And it can be pretty dry. Don’t expect excitement here. But it’s important. Want to surface a few ideas and my perspectives.

The most immediate action I want us to take is splitting the Advisory Board into a group of Local Chapters, and a group for corporates. The Advisory Board as-is has failed – the Board asks for nothing from it, and the Advisory Board offers up very little. I don’t think Local Chapters and companies have the same concerns, or have a lot to say to each other in front of the Board. So let’s split and see if it becomes more interesting. As usual, discussions from the Advisory Board would be reported out publicly.

I’m more interested in what Local Chapters have to say. I think empowering Local Chapters in OSMF governance is how we make sure that OSMF is relevant and serving more communities and mappers. There was an excellent discussion on this during State of the Map. It’s not clear what governance models make sense – federated decision making, designated rotating Board seats, etc – but let’s start looking at this in what will be a long deliberation. I think the Local Chapters and Communities Working Group could also be a good place to dig in.

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Wonderful story about the OpenStreetMap India community on the cover of Bangalore’s largest newspaper.

A decade ago Schuyler and myself were invited to share OpenStreetMap across India. I documented that life changing trip. It was a significant launching point event, but was not the start of the OpenStreetMap community in India however – Arun Ganesh, Shekhar Krishnan and others were already well on the way. And certainly all credit for what’s developed since goes to the folks mapping every day.

For me personally, it was a lifelong highlight of my career. As well, it was also a significant personal launching point. And probably for OpenStreetMap as a whole. Later that year we helped Palestinians map the West Bank. The next year, we initiated Map Kibera. All of these experiences contributed to the formative moments of Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team.

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I took a tip from Dexter from the City of Detroit Office of Innovation, and started on the Detroit Mapping Challenge by browsing City of Detroit Open Data. What open data could help make OpenStreetMap Detroit the best map in the world? BikeShare locations looked like a useful and straightforward starting point. And now OSM Detroit has very accurate MoGo bike share docking stations. There turned out to be a few surprises getting there, and lessons to absorb for mapping all of Detroit.

The data looked decent on quick inspection, and is licensed public domain. Maybe a very small human supervised import is in order. I browsed OSM to see what was already there, and turned out this already all 43 docking stations were already added by mapper175, with the changeset comment Added nodes for MoGo Bike Share system stations (resurvey needed for most of them). Are they in the right place? Is there something a remote mapper could do here?

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I’m starting to reflect on OpenStreetMap over the holiday. The last several months have personally been simultaneously trying and inspiring. Here’s a few thoughts…

We are all the community Do you contribute and participate in OpenStreetMap in any way? Map, organize, code, discuss, etc? Then you are in the OSM community.

We need to move away from talking about the “OSM community” as being either the people we agree with or the people we disagree with. It’s a pattern I see too much. There are plenty of people and groups that are 100% part of the community, but don’t fully realize it.

Community looks different in different places The kind of people, background and settings hosting our community look very different in every city, every country.

This is one of the most amazing things about OpenStreetMap — we’re all working together! University students, open source coders, slum dwellers, professional teams, ambassador(s), geographers. Keeping this in mind is super challenging and necessary for a global project. Trying to understand where others are coming from is something everyone can learn to do, and do better.

We agree far more than we disagree The things we agree on our huge — mapping the entire world openly is still a radical idea.

But the things we argue about might seem like insurmountable gulfs. Yet even on the “polarizing” topics of the past months — organized editing, code of conduct, quality etc — from my seat there’s a huge amount of agreement. Lot of the gulf seems to be about particulars of language and how to get there, rather than essential meanings.

Most of us are quiet The overwhelming vast majority of people on mailing lists and in the OSM community as a whole are not saying anything.

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The sun shined on the Local Chapter Congress at State of the Map 2016. It was fantastic to hear from so many people from so many communities.

Yes, sorry, it is long overdue to share – shortly after SotM, I took leave after the birth of my son, and only finding space to pick this up with the upcoming Board Face to Face.

There were many solid ideas, and of course further discussion. Would love to find several avenues to explore these. I think one could be the Advisory Board, which will include representatives from official Local Chapters. For “incubating” local chapters, maybe we discuss ideas on the local chapters mailing list. For communication ideas, we should figure out the right place…

Dorothea took thorough notes from the session. Posting the summary below.

Organising local communities

How OSMF Could Help?

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I’m running again for Chair of Voting Members for Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team.

My outlook on the role is similar to last year.

I’ve been busy with the Governance Working Group, and the Election Committee – for both the new member nominations and Board / Chair elections. These seem to be going smoothly! Working on these has helped further refine our processes and documents. We now have a new member “Welcome Pack”.

Happy to continue with this responsibility next year. Please get in touch if you have any questions or ideas for the role of the Chair.

Working on the challenge laid out by @Zverik to add subscriptions to diary comments was fun! Now I want to suggest another – an overview of all notifications across OSM.org. This would include diary entries, comments, and notes.

Ideally this page would list subscriptions, in order of most recently commented.

One complexity, Notes have a different subscription workflow than diary entries and comments. With Notes, the original poster and any commenter are notified of comments. There’s no way to subscribe otherwise, or unsubscribe. We may want to, in the future, modify that to follow the same workflow.

As laid out by Zverik :”The offer is not indefinite: the PR must be submitted until the 15th of November and merged before the 15th of December. And yes, there might be a competition, in that case OWG will decide the winner by merging a pull request.”

State of the Map attendees are coming to Brussels from (at least) 52 countries! The global State of the Map is a unequaled time to come together in person to share experiences from every corner of the world, find common ground, and plan what’s next for OpenStreetMap.

Many of us, among the over 400 attendees, are local community organizers. We hold mapping parties, organize local SotMs, even register organizations and sign up as official Local Chapters. I’m excited that we have dedicated time to talk as local communities on Sunday – during the panel discussion of State of the Local Map and the open discussion of Local Chapters Congress. There’s call to have a Local Birds of a Feather. The discussions we have in Brussels will continue with local communities gathering next week in Manila for State of the Map Asia.

Folks like Martijn, Joost, and myself have been talking with OpenStreetMap local community organizers over the past few months, to learn more about what they’re doing, motivations, their challenges, and what they need from the global OpenStreetMap community.

What I’ve found is that local communities are seeking to get more organized to engage more officially with government agencies, universities and other institutions. They find they need financial administration beyond borrowing someone’s bank account. While some have seen the value of becoming an official OSM Foundation Local Chapter, there is still lack a clarity to some about the necessity and benefits. Nevertheless, they see a lot of value to learn from others working on similar issues – everything from legal and administrative issues of starting an organization, to sharing community engagement strategies that work, to amplifying the voices of their community in the global OSM conversation especially for non-English speakers. Regional connections are especially valuable, for working with mappers in similar languages, timezones, and to some extent culture.

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I’m running for Chair of Voting Members for Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team.

I see the Chair as a straightforward role. The key responsibility is to communicate responsibilities and opportunities to HOT Voting Members, and organize the space for official convening and processes. This includes notification of Annual and Special Meetings, Elections and Ballots, as well as ensuring announcements of other meetings, like Working Groups. Expect to work closely with the Board Secretary and HOT’s Operations Coordinator, and the Governance Working Group, in these tasks.

My work over the last year with the Governance Working Group has prepared me well for this role. I have been closely studying, revising and clarifying HOT’s Bylaws and processes, with focus on making our governance work well for us.

This work be done with excellent clarity. HOT Voting Members cover nearly every time zone, many languages, and everyone’s time is precious. Our governance responsibilities should be straightforward and understandable, so we can focus most of our efforts on the amazing core work of HOT.

That time of year again … take stock of my year in HOT. Started off the year as a Presidential Innovation Fellow at the State Department working on MapGive, supporting HOT from the US government side. End the year working at Mapbox, still supporting HOT!

At State, got to help facilitate some truly remarkable collaborations. Nepal was a huge focus for all of us. I worked a lot on coordination, imagery, communications, especially within the USG. Worked with a great group of people to increase cooperation among institutions in OSM. We helped formed a Open Government Commitment to OpenStreetMap, with a great showing at the OGP Summit in Mexico City.

Was part of the team that put together an incredible, inaugural HOT Summit. What an incredible event. Got to tell a story of some of the early HOT history. Started off that week lending a hand with HOT Activation Curriculum Sprint.

Spent time on the Governance Working Group, putting together Bylaws updates. We now have 2 year terms for Board members! Lots more to do.

Sadly saw Kate depart as ED, but warmly welcome Tyler. There’s been a super skilled group of folks volunteering and working with HOT over the year, and happily talked with them about various things. What an amazing year — Tanzania, OpenAerialMap, Export Tool, and everything else I’m missing.

At Mapbox, we made a public commitment to HOT, which I hope is a model for other organizations supporting HOT. We matched the first 10k of the HOT fundraiser.

What about 2016? I’m going to keep volunteering on the Governance WG, we have work to do. Also interested to connect up more with HOT Training and education efforts. I’m on the State of the Map WG, and think we could pull off a great HOT Summit adjacent to it in Brussels. I’m very interested to invest time in local organization capacity, and hope efforts with Local Chapters in the OSMF (where I am now on the Board) can help with that.

Recently learned there is a new real estate development in the early stages of planning in my neighborhood. The Josephite’s Seminary has over a block of undeveloped space, and they’ve entered into agreement with EYA to build townhomes on the property. The number of townhomes being discussed is 150, a higher density of development than the surrounding neighborhood.

imagery: © Mapbox, Digital Globe.

I had a hard time picturing how 150 townhomes could fit on the site. EYA hasn’t yet come up with detailed plans, and has stated that they want to work with the community in the design phase. I am also interested in how maps could help the neighborhood envision ideas for what they want for the development.

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I am excited to put myself forward to serve on the OpenStreetMap Foundation Board. I’m a mapper, coder, communicator and organizer, obsessed with OpenStreetMap for over 10 years. The OSM community has grown phenomenally. The core governance of OSM, the OSM Foundation, has kept the core resources of OSM stable and strong, but has struggled to keep up with the community. OSMF needs to grow. Growth doesn’t necessarily mean get bigger; I believe within our community we have everything we already need. What it does definitely mean is getting smarter and faster about how we engage and collaborate together beyond the map. That means creating proper space and structure in OSMF for a much broader diversity voices and activities of the OpenStreetMap community. I have a strong record of building alliances and networks in the OpenStreetMap community, and am ready to bring my efforts to OSMF.

OSM is a global project, and participation in OSMF should reflect that diversity. Local Chapters are a critical means to bring more voices and energy into OSMF. Local Chapters are national and local level groups of OSM mappers, some more formalized than others. We should engage Local Chapters (whether officially signed up with OSMF via an agreement, or more nascent) to broaden our discussions and deliberations, and recruit more help for the critical activities of the working groups. We can help Local Chapters do what they do better, with support for community management, events, and organizational capacity. Linking chapters together to share their knowledge benefits everyone. I’d help kickstart this, through targetted discussions through Local Chapters, on what they hope to see from OSMF and OSM.

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