I pondered what to write for this year for a while. This is one of the reasons this report comes to you all a few hours prior to the AGM. I think I’ll settle for a simple “thank you”. Thank you to all of my fellow board members who have served with me over the past 6 years. We haven’t always seen eye to eye, but I believe we all have acted with the best interest of the OpenStreetMap community at heart.

OpenStreetMap community, when I began mapping a decade ago I couldn’t have imagined where OpenStreetMap would have taken me. I left the world of proprietary data and software, moved to another country, made many friends and have had many adventures. Many of you have welcomed me into your homes over the years. Some of my closest friends are because of our free community map.

To the working groups, thank you for all your work supporting both the community and the OpenStreetMap community. You are the glue that keeps things going, often in invisible ways.

To the candidates, thanks for your passion and desire to run for the OSMF board. If you don’t succeed this time, keep the passion up! I actually ran 3 times prior to being elected.

I also wish the new OSMF board the best of luck. Many depend on our special community map. Please steward it well.

Each and every year I’m impressed by the progress the OSM community has made. Supporting that community is at the core of the OpenStreetMap Foundation. This year the OSMF had its own progress as well, including within the board.

We kicked of the year with a generous donation from the Pineapple Fund which was worth over €200,000. What a wonderful surprise to start the year!

Less of a surprise was work this year to work on making sure OSM and the OSMF are in compliance with GDPR. One of the board’s roles is to approve policies and guidelines, we did quite a bit of that this year. Some updates were because of GDPR and others were policies that did not exist, but were needed.

A few policies were updated this year primarily due to the hard work of the Legal Working Group. The Trademark Policy was updated. Additionally due to GDPR the Privacy Policy and the Terms of Service were updated.

The Organized Editing Policy was developed by the Data Working Group and approved by the board this year to provide guidelines for organizations and groups editing together in a directed fashion.

Fee Waiver Program is not new, but had not as of yet been implemented. The Membership Working Group developed a process for those unable to technically pay and will be developing further process for those with financial hardship. The OSMF Board has already begun an approval process for those requesting a waiver who wish to claim financial hardship.

The OSMF moved in two different ways this year as well. There was a data center move I really appreciate all the hard work the Operations Working Group put into this move.

The year our official address moved as well. Certainly less dramatic than the server move, but important nonetheless. Thanks to Andy Robinson for all the years of hosting as the mail center for the OSMF.

Our new address if you ever need it is: OpenStreetMap Foundation St John’s Innovation Centre Cowley Road Cambridge CB4 0WS United Kingdom

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When sitting down to write the Chairperson’s Report for this Annual General Meeting of the OpenStreetMap Foundation I have to confess I was having a difficult time. Not because OpenStreetMap hasn’t continued to make great strides over the past year and continue to become further THE free map of the entire world. No, it was because my heart once again was heavy. This year’s election has been even more hostile than others. Some of the debate has surrounded around if OpenStreetMap is currently a welcoming place for all and if we ever make people not feel welcome due to the actions of some of our members.

Procrastinating on writing this I was scrolling through Twitter and I happened across a quote from the CEO of Creative Commons, Ryan Merkley.

“Pick big fights with your enemies, not small fights with your friends.”

Stop and think about that for a moment.

When OpenStreetMap started we picked a huge fight with proprietary map provides. For a long time we were just some little upstart, but then they began to take us seriously. Today we continue to be used in more prominent and more important ways all over the world. Just in the past 2 weeks OpenStreetMap became used in Ingress and Pokemon Go, applications of millions of users. New editors are coming in because they can update the map themselves. How exciting is it that all our work continues to be used in more and more ways?

What is our next big fight to continue to be the best free map of the entire world? Let’s all think about those challenges and how we are going to surmount them.

How can we lay aside differences and be welcoming to people who are different from us? It is certainly not from fighting amongst ourselves. That just makes people want to check out, myself included, hence the difficulty in writing this report.

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Since the 2015 Annual General Meeting of the OpenStreetMap Foundation is taking place virtually this year I’m writing up this diary entry to serve as the Chairperson’s person.

Firstly I’d like to thank everyone to contributed to the Foundation this year. Specifically I’d like to thank:

• Working Groups: Without you the OSMF couldn’t run. Thank you for all that you’ve done over the past year, including some sometimes thankless tasks. Let’s all work together in 2016 to recruit more people to our working groups.
• Members: Thank you for being a part of the OSMF. I look forward to seeing the results of your voting and many discussions in the future on where the Foundation should go.
• Corporate Members: Your support helps us staying in good financial footing. Please continue participating in the community and thank you again.
• Board members: It has been a pleasure to serve with you. Henk, Kathleen, Dermot and Oliver your service is most appreciated. I look forward to working with you in other aspects of the OSM community.
• The OpenStreetMap community: we need you most of all! Without our community there would be no reason for the OSMF and we’d have nothing to support. Please reach out if there is anything I can do to assist.

Board Activities

The OSMF Board was able to meet in person in February this year. Having not met in quite a while it allowed us to get to know each other better and begin to further work on strategy. One of the major things we learned is though it might seem at first as if our opinions are so far apart that a compromise isn’t possible, once we talk through it really there is much agreement. Many of these items we haven’t moved from draft form, but plan to take up with the next board in 2016. One such item is hiring of administrative help.

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I continued mapping footways and POI of interest to pedestrians in Sterling, Virginia. I have mapped roughly 15 miles worth of paths on foot in the past couple weeks. Eventually I hope to create a walking map of the area.

Yesterday was the SIlver Spring Mapping party. In addition to people on the MappingDC mailing list a couple members of the community showed up as well. We added a bunch of POI's and corrected a couple Tiger Street mistakes.