Greetings OSM community,

The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) adapted its governance structure last year to open seats on the Board of Directors for non-members. We are now recruiting two (2) Appointed Directors. Applications are open until April 24, 2025 — visit HOT Careers for more information and to apply.

The main reason for introducing Appointed (as opposed to solely Elected) Directors is to bring in people—and skill sets—that are not currently in abundance within our voting membership. Of course, a passion for geospatial technology and data in humanitarian, disaster, and climate response is still desirable. However, we are particularly seeking individuals with expertise in financial sustainability, diversified fundraising, and innovative hybrid business models. Ideal candidates will have a proven track record of leading impact-driven organizations through strategic growth and transformation.

As the current Secretary of the HOT Board of Directors, I’m happy to answer any questions about this opportunity. We’re excited to welcome new perspectives and strengths that complement our existing Board, which brings deep OSM/HOT history and expertise.

Best regards, =Russ

Use Russell.Deffner (at) hotosm (dot) org if you’d like to email inquiries related to this position.

Ten years ago today, I created this user profile!

Although it was not my first profile, the other one I only did a few edits before forgetting the password and a couple months later created this one. I since found that other password but instead of trying to ‘revive’ or switch-over, I chose to have the sysadmin folks delete the slightly older profile and continued on with this one. Hence, celebrating a few months late :D

However, rather than just celebrating the fact that I’ve been contributing to OSM for 10 years+, I will also use this as an opportunity to fulfill my voluntary obligations as a Voting Member of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) to summarize my contributions (since my last summary in January of 2019) and aspirations for the coming year. Over the almost 2 years now, things have changed quite dramatically. You might think ‘because of Audacious?’ or ‘because of HOT launching a fully funded Disaster Services program?’ - which yes, and yes; but much more so because I got married, had a baby and have been living on the other side of the planet (mostly due to the COVID situation) since my last update - yep, time flies when you’re having fun :)

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2019 is starting as busy and hectic as 2018 ended, so this will be a very brief review of 2018 as a Voting Member of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) but more importantly a globally active OSM contributor.

The Big Important Stuff

• AI-Assisted Roads: Since the tail-end of 2017, I have been managing a team for HOT based in our Jakarta office that is working on the Facebook AI-Assisted Roads project. This has been an amazing project, (personally for getting to work with the team in-person for a week) but is also a great collaboration and use-case for machine learning in mapping/OSM.
• Disaster Response: In 2018, HOT activated to coordinate or support coordination for 24 disaster incidents. Our next biggest year, in terms of number of recorded responses (obviously there’s always some small incidents that we never hear about or get involved with, but local OSM-ers map so we don’t know to count those), was 2010 - the year HOT was founded - with 10 responses. This shows our ability to react quicker, have the capacity to often coordinate multiple responses at once, and that we’re doing a better job documenting responses we are involved in (and maybe that there were just a lot of disasters in 2018).
• HOT Governance: There is still a lot of work to be done, but I remain an active participant in HOT governance. Most notably in 2018, I committed to helping write the first Strategic Plan which we just finished drafting on December 28th - now it’s off to the Board and Executive Director for review and if all goes well - to membership vote during the Annual Meeting.

The Fun Stuff

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It has been a few years since I last posted what I have been up to as far as my Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) membership involvement as well as my personal contributions to OpenStreetMap (OSM). This time I thought it would be easiest to just do a brief overview by category: ## The Homefront: Forest (and other) Mapping in Colorado My goal of getting Park County, Colorado mapped continues to fall off schedule 😊 – I did get more done, just was side-tracked when a few of us started making a real push to map the forested parts of our state. Most of 2017 was focused on humanitarian mapping, so there is much more work I would still like to do locally. However, although it has been delayed on several accounts, we are so very close to starting the Denver Planimetrics import. ## Disaster Response: Activation Coordination for HOT There were lots of disasters over the last couple of years. Some notables were: Floods in Sri Lanka and Peru, a string of Earthquakes in 2016 (Indonesia, Japan, Ecuador), Hurricane Matthew, a ‘smaller’ outbreak of Ebola in the DRC and lots more that just didn’t require or garner a formal response. Two, I will expand upon…

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Greetings OpenStreetMap-pers,

This is a summary of a few key topics from the OSM-Colorado Meetup yesterday. I was really excited to have this handful of folks together; it felt more like an ‘OSM super group’ meeting than any of the meetups I have organized; reminded me of some of the early OSM-Colorado events I attended back in 2010-2011. Although I think we all had some kind of mobile device/laptop/etc. no one ‘fired anything up for show and tell’ but instead we really just had a great time hashing-out some of the major issues and opportunities around OpenStreetMap in Colorado, USA.

One of the most significant items is a wonderful opportunity to work directly with the Denver Regional Council of Governments to explore importing a huge volume of data that they have purchased and are releasing as Public Domain. We are still very much in the ‘exploratory’ stage, and have started a wiki-page. There are so many ‘side-topics’ that come up with this discussion: how to conflate with existing data, perform import(s) when/where appropriate, make it community driven, frequency that the data will be updated, how to maintain and update when there is need, and a whole lot more. Stay tuned to that page and/or the import mailing list as we begin to ramp up the effort.

We also discussed this year’s MapCamp! – Poudre Canyon. The High Park Fire in 2012 and Floods in 2013 reeked some havoc in and around Poudre Canyon, so although I have been told that some of the camping/recreation is still closed; I think it’s an even better reason to ‘head up north’ so we can do some surveying and get OSM up-to-date with the changes caused by those incidents. However, we might be looking further ‘up the canyon’ towards Cameron Pass or maybe Pingree Park area for camping. We also discussed timing and it seems like mid-August is what we are looking at (i.e. between SotM-US and SotM-International, but before it starts getting cold up high; and June seemed pretty full already for most of us).

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