Foundation/AGM2022/Election to Board/Answers and manifestos/Q03 What would you personally like to achieve when on the board

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What would you personally like to achieve when on the board ? Do you have a focus ?

  • What are 1 or 2 discreet areas you are going to focus on when on the Board?
  • How specifically are you going to work to achieve goals for those areas ... other than just talking!?

Daniela Waltersdorfer J. - Q03 What would you personally like to achieve when on the board? Do you have a focus?

Great question! I decided to run because I think the OSMF and its Board needs to showcase diversity to better support the community it represents. I also would like to work towards better strategies and plans for the application and acceptance process for local chapters. The OSMF has to learn from its global members and understand the distinct needs existing and potential chapters have, I've said it many times, one size does not fit all, and everything cannot simply big black-or-white. This should not be scary, for our differences is what makes this project the great success it is.

Arnalie Vicario - Q03 What would you personally like to achieve when on the board? Do you have a focus?

You can read about what I hope to achieve if I get elected as a Board Member in my manifesto.

Włodzimierz Bartczak - Q03 What would you personally like to achieve when on the board? Do you have a focus?

My goals, maybe a little too ambitious, but you have to have the bar set high.

Reactivation of Strategic Working Group (SWG)

For me, this is the top priority. Regardless of the outcome of the elections, I will work to reactivate this working group. To continue work on the Strategic Plan Outline and turn it into a full-fledged strategic plan for the coming years. I would like to involve all stakeholders with a special focus on the Local Chapters. The document thus developed will form the basis for further action for the Board and the Working Groups for the coming years. Professionally, I co-create such projects, so it will not be a problem for me to organize it.

Supporting Local Chapters and Communities

OSM's greatest resource is the people who make it up. On this we all agree. By supporting local communities we have a unique opportunity to benefit from cultural AND environmental diversity. In this regard, I would like to act according to the principle: "Thinking globally, acting locally".

  • The easiest way to tap this huge potential is to support members of local communities in the work of individual working groups. I am thinking here primarily of the Data Working Group and the License Working Group.
  • I would like to propose the resumption of a mini-grant program in a new format, which would be limited to activities in specific areas and their implementation would be associated with measurable results in a specific time frame. Targeted to both individual editors and Local Chapters (LCs). Preliminarily selected areas are:
    • promotion of the OpenStreetMap project in public space.
    • education on editing and working with OpenStreetMap data.
    • cross-border projects requiring cooperation of individual Local Chapters (LC).
    • creation of software or new functionalities of existing ones, supporting infrastructure or promoting OpenStreetMap.
  • Development of a technology support program for LCs
  • Supporting LC data acquisition processes for integration with OpenStreetMap
  • Best of the Best - a program for information exchange and flow of good practices between individual LCs
  • Improved profile tab - Currently we are not utilizing the potential of our user account, I'd like to propose expanding its functionality so that data currently available on third-party sites is integrated into our profile including membership in a specific community. Of course, such a change will require tremendous forethought, testing and will take a lot of time, but the benefits that follow will be worth the effort (An example of such a solution is this proposal from Playzinho [1])

Takeover protection

For me, supporting local communities and increasing the involvement of individual editors not associated with organizations that may pose a threat is the best protection against a takeover. Unfortunately, it is not enough. The key to guarding against takeover is transparency and clear procedures and rules for working with individual institutions. We should actively cooperate with all project stakeholders while at the same time trying to enforce any violations of the rules of use and the license itself.

Among the actions I would like to take in this regard are:

  • Collaborating with local communities and increasing the membership of the DWG so that it can operate more efficiently.
  • Preparing the requirements for an integrated system for receiving reports from institutions using OpenStreetMap data, including reports of violations of the ODbL license and lack of attribution, and then starting to implement it.
  • Analyzing the need to hire a specialist to support us in ODbL enforcement.
  • Support Communication Working Group's efforts to build a positive image of OSM and OSMF and our participation in the creation of open data.

Ariel Kadouri - Q03 What would you personally like to achieve when on the board? Do you have a focus?

With the current board turnover it may be difficult to predict the focus areas of the new members but there are three things I would like to see happen with the next board:

Initiate the next steps in the Data Model project.

The Data Model upgrade will require funding and coordination to ensure the initiative has the resources it needs to move forward in a reasonable amount of time. A designated board member to manage those requests would help make sure the work is not left aside. This answer is further expanded on below in "Question 7".

Create a space for coordination between mappers and data consumers.

Mappers and data consumers are often reading between wiki pages, mailing lists, changesets, blogs, forums, Slack, Discord, Twitter, Mastodon, in order to find consensus on how and why something is the way it is. There should be an organized space for these conversations to occur and while the board should not be dictating these conversations, it can help set them up. This answer is further expanded on below in "Question 8".

Increase visibility of the OSMF Board and Working Groups.

The board and working groups are accomplishing great work. The Communication Working Group helps promote OSM and the board can work together to help promote initiatives as well as be an entry point for external communication.

Victor N.Sunday - Q03 What would you personally like to achieve when on the board? Do you have a focus?

Christian Shadrack - Q03 What would you personally like to achieve when on the board? Do you have a focus?

My presence in the office will give me the opportunity to mark first the presence of Africa with my participation, then try to encourage sessions of mapathon or state of the map for francophones, because it seems to have a slight decline in participation for the francophone world that needs to be encouraged. Especially for the DRC, a big country with a lot of potential.

Already with the regular participation in the different mapathons and to position oneself as a volunteer interpreter this already encourages. In the last state of map Africa I was an English-French interpreter that had encouraged a lot the participation of French speakers and especially the participation and registration of many new Congolese contributors.

Sarah Hoffmann - Q03 What would you personally like to achieve when on the board? Do you have a focus?

The issue most close to my heart is that work in the OSMF is still spread out on far too few shoulders. I'd like to works towards getting more people involved. I don't speak so much about increasing the mapping community or OSMF membership but about having more people who have an active role in the OSMF. I'd like to understand how we can make working groups more attractive and how to improve the on-boarding of new people. It's funny that the question mentions 'just talking' because I fully expect that a large part of working towards this goal involves talking and, maybe more importantly, listening to people.

Logan McGovern - Q03 What would you personally like to achieve when on the board? Do you have a focus?

I know many on the board have put much work towards ensuring viable long-term funding for the project. With my educational background in finance I would like to further these efforts. There has been some discussion in the past about the expansion of the tagging system to accommodate languages besides English. I would like to see this happen, possibly starting with French and Spanish. I want to establish a better infrastructure for the interaction between various parties in the OSM community. Processes to facilitate collaborative work being done between corporate editors and the locals who have a lot of valuable information to share about how objects and tags are best represented in their country. I would be pushing for the board to undertake research to see what special privileges or responsibilities can possibly be extended to local chapters to increase their relevance, and their say in the future of the map.

Arun Ganesh - Q03 What would you personally like to achieve when on the board? Do you have a focus?

Improve OSM homepage

One of the first windows into the OSM world is the homepage on osm.org which is a great platform to communicate what the project is about. There is significant room for improvement to how we would like to communicate the existence of diverse communities and languages that has made such an incredible map possible.

I would like to chair a committee to propose a homepage redesign to make the site more accessible and easy to navigate for a total newcomer to help grow the OSM member base throughout the world.

Mateusz Konieczny - Q03 What would you personally like to achieve when on the board? Do you have a focus?

Transparency

As far as I can see you cannot easily find info on how OSMF spends and obtains in budget. It should be possible for any literate person to visit https://osmfoundation.org/ and be able to quickly discover what is among the top spending positions for OSMF. It should be possible to check how much was spent on iD development, how much on grants, how much on rendering servers and so on.

I would push to make this data available, in as great detail as possible. And in case of this data becomes available - I am promising to make a summary and infographic understandable by people.

I am willing to help with collecting, processing and publishing this data (also if I will be not elected).

OSM attribution

There are numerous users of OSM data, larger and smaller that fail to follow the license and legally required attribution is missing. So far OSMF took no real steps to handle specific violators, as far as I know.

I would try to take actual steps that could involve

  • actual official letter sent by OSMF asking to start following the OSM license
    • starting from something smaller than the largest companies on the planet
  • DMCA takedowns targeting apps, websites and others that are in persistent violation of the OSM license
    • again: starting the legal process against a company that can spend the GDP of a small country on lawyers is not a good starting point
  • post blog posts praising people or organizations clearly attributing OSM as needed
  • consulting a lawyer so that these previous steps will not be horribly bad for us

As a reminder - the initial plan for OSMF was to be 20% on legal spending. I am not advocating spending 10% of budget on enforcing the license, but we can allocate some funds to consult a lawyer to write DMCA template for us.

Again, I am willing to help with drafting plan, processing responses (again, some things may be achieved here not only as a board member)

GDPR

And one more completely boring task - I would push toward actually doing something to comply with GDPR. See this and that. Yes, it is boring. Yes, doing this will break some things - which is not surprising as GDPR was legislation intended to outlaw and break some things. It still needs to be done. Tools available to the OSMF board may include setting priority for OWG, posting blog posts begging for help or hiring someone to do legally mandatory things where no one volunteered for years. And review the situation again, maybe we do not need to do anything - in such case, various GDPR documentation should be updated.

I would help with a review of the situation and drafting a planned decision.

more?

There are many other boring and necessary projects, but succeeding even in part with what is listed (and helping with other OSMF tasks) would be a huge success. After all, having 10 priorities means that one has no priorities at all.

Craig Allan - Q03 What would you personally like to achieve when on the board? Do you have a focus?

What are 1 or 2 discreet areas you are going to focus on when on the Board? How specifically are you going to work to achieve goals for those areas ... other than just talking!?

I'll take a month to find my feet in the new role. Once up and running I am particularly keen to support, encourage and push not one focus issue but a spread of several different things - the community side of OSMF, the technical side of OSMF and the inclusivity side. I'll probably do a lot of administrative work too - I plan to help in as many different ways as I can.

Administration:

As a newcomer I'd like to do a lot more than talking. I am a doer not a talker. I will offer my skills to the Board and work wherever I can provide most value to the organisation. I may end up working on administrative tasks that are not my personal preference, but I certainly have the discipline to put aside personal goals and meet the needs of the group.

I have no work or family care commitments. I am willing to dedicate a lot of time to administrative tasks.

Community:

I feel that OSMF is not sufficiently in touch with and encouraging, growing and uniting the awesome OSM communities that are already in place all over the world. I'd like to fix that. Plus of course, I want to encourage the growth of the OSM community in places where there are still few or no mappers. I will especially want to work with African mappers to build and support our growing local communities, but I am aware that the Board is global, so I have a global role and must be fair to all.

Inclusivity:

I'm keen to enrich the membership and the Board itself by promoting diversity and encouraging the broad range of life-experience that diverse people bring to the table. I'm well used to being the only white guy in the room so I get uncomfortable with not seeing mixed meetings. That's an aspect of racial diversity, but the full breadth of gender diversity is important to me too. And race and gender are not all - age, ability, wealth are other discrimination axes. The diversity improvement problem we experience in OSM has led to a big debate that currently seems to be stalled, but I want it to stay on the agenda. I think we need to kickstart a diversity and inclusion programme and formulate new concrete implementable plans for advancing diversity, equity and inclusion in the OSMF structures.

Tech:

The technical side is the back-room stuff, which nobody sees and nobody knows about. I think more communication about the tech that runs OSM is important, as is resourcing the people who do the work, with both funds and more people. I can help with communication, more than I can with coding and systems. Beyond that, I'd like to see us updating and improving the software, encouraging the change from tiles to vector maps, especially because vector maps should enable more language choice in map labelling and lastly keeping all the hardware up to date and highly reliable.


OSM Foundation's board election 2022: official questions

All board candidates' manifestos

2022 OpenStreetMap Foundation's: Board election - Voting information and instructions - Annual General Meeting

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Annual General Meetings of the OpenStreetMap Foundation
Board Elections
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