Foundation/AGM2024/Election to Board/Answers and manifestos/Q09 Your Community Contributions
Your Community Contributions
The OSMF's primary mission is supporting the global OpenStreetMap community. What specific contributions have you made to OpenStreetMap that reflect your commitment to this mission? Have you participated in cooperative mapping, tagging development, OSM-related software or map style development, or spoken at events or conferences? Have you engaged with the OSM community in your local area or in languages other than English?
Craig Allan - Q09 Your Community Contributions
My very biggest contribution is mapping. Since 2010 I have made 1.8 million map changes. See https://hdyc.neis-one.org/?cRaIgalLAn Many, many mouse-clicks. I had to buy a clickless mouse because I was annoying my wife. My other big contribution is that I have contributed a lot of time working on the Board for 2023 and 2024 as Strategy lead, Board Secretary, Finance Committee chair and personnel manager, and I think that my contributions have been valued.
I worked as a local team volunteer on SotM 2020 in Cape Town; the conference that was made venueless at the last moment due to COVID. I participated in the recent microgrant programme. I have spoken at SotM and I engage with the OSM South Africa and OSM Africa community. I am a member of the USA community.
Brazil Singh - Q09 Your Community Contributions
I’ve been deeply committed to supporting the global OpenStreetMap (OSM) community through various contributions that reflect my dedication to the mission. Well, Here in this link I have listed all my OSM Contributions. During my time with YouthMappers, I participated in mapping training, including a flood mapping project in Thailand. This experience allowed me to collaborate with others to improve the accuracy and detail of map data in affected areas. I’ve been involved in discussions around tagging and mapping standards, working with the community to refine and update tagging practices to ensure that map data is both accurate and useful. While I haven’t directly contributed to software or map style development, I’ve been actively engaged in learning about these areas and supporting related projects through feedback and testing. I’ve led workshops as part of the YouthMappers Leadership Fellowship and participated in local events to share knowledge about OSM and its applications. These speaking engagements have helped raise awareness and educate others about the value of open mapping. I counducted more than 14 hybrid traing on OSM unde Open Mapping Hub, Asia Pacific and I started 26 series of workshop in Collaboratio with Youthmappers and Tomtom. Also I’ve been involved in organizing fundraising efforts for flood-affected communities, demonstrating my commitment to applying mapping to real-world challenges. Additionally, I’m working on a website which wll help younger community to learn about osm and other OSM related activities. Although my primary communication has been in English, I am actively working on expanding my outreach to include local languages. I aim to engage with diverse communities and contribute to OSM in a way that reflects a global perspective.
Courtney Cook Williamson - Q09 Your Community Contributions
Prior to working at TomTom and learning about OSM, I knew a bit about open source software, but was entirely clueless about anything to do with GIS. As part of my job at TT, I had to learn a lot about OSM tagging schema in order to help make sure TomTom’s mapping challenges were aligned with OSM rules and values. I also interacted with OSM communities online in about 150 countries as a community engager. Then, as mentioned above, I studied OSM channel data with a former TomTom colleague, presenting our findings at SotM US in Richmond, VA. (There is a recap of that presentation here: [1].) I also presented on storytelling (aka “talking about talking”) at last year’s SotM EU in Antwerp. (The recap is here: [2].) As I mentioned above, I do a lot with the CWG, as well, including: I wrote most of the 20th Birthday website at [3]. I helped concept, write and implement the new fundraising website at[4], as well, and I helped lead the broad base giving campaign on social media that raised more than £100k in 2023. I have helped expand and improve our social media presence by writing posts and helping implement the social media management tool, Buffer. I am also a regular contributor to the OSMF blog [5]. My background in corporate communications has helped me advise the board on how to report to and engage with its donors.
The thing I am most proud of, though, is that I learned how to map in OSM. I haven't mapped a lot, but I can make a basic edit and will continue to expand my skills. Even though my education was entirely in the humanities and I have very little computer science or engineering experience, I now have a general understanding of how maps are made.
Maurizio Napolitano - Q09 Your Community Contributions
Like many others, I fell in love with OpenStreetMap (OSM) the moment I discovered it, and I’ve had the fortune of building my career around it. I’ve contributed to scientific research with several publications on OSM (and also published the scripts used for the analysis) and helped spread OSM in Italy by organizing OSMIT (the Italian OSM conferences) and creating the Italian chapter with Wikimedia Italia. I’ve spoken at three TEDx events (Trento, Siena, and Potenza) about OSM and regularly appeared on Italian [media (TV (watch after 36:11 mninutes, radio, newspapers) to promote the project
I’ve been a speaker at various national and international conferences, always advocating for OSM, and I am frequently invited to open data discussions at both national and European levels due to my OSM background. I was also engaged as an NGI influencer by the European Commission, focusing on digital commons, and my talks in English have highlighted the value of OSM. Additionally, I contributed to the analysis of high-value geospatial datasets in the European Open Data Directive, exploring opportunities related to OSM.
In general, I am an active advocate of OSM in Italy, both from an activist and entrepreneurial perspective, and people often describe me as an evangelist of OpenStreetMap. While my main outreach is in Italian, I also participate in international discussions on open data, always bringing OSM as a reference. I contribute to scientific research on OSM, examining data quality, the importance of the community, and OSM’s role in geospatial analysis.
There isn’t a day that goes by where I don’t encourage people to contribute to OSM and show them how to do it.
A small final note: My wife is Chinese, and we speak German together, although I have never delivered public talks in this language.
Can Ünen - Q09 Your Community Contributions
- I started contributing to the Turkish edition of WeeklyOSM around 2013, which is something I still try to follow up and contribute.
- With my colleague, we received the honour to attend the United Nations Geographic Information Working Group (UNGIWG) 2013 Annual Plenary in Istanbul, Turkey in early 2013 to talk about OSM and conduct a small mapping exercise with the attendees representing the Turkish OSM community.
- In 2016, I attended my first SotM in Brussels which gave me an amazing opportunity to meet with numerous people and organizations I met and coordinated with online, including HOT.
- In 2017 I co-founded Yer Cizenler, a local NGO based in Istanbul to have a legal entity within the Turkish OSM community. I was the chair of the board from 2018 until early 2024. With extensive community & partner outreach we have established solid relationships with student communities and departments at universities, local governments, other NGOs and institutions through trainings, dialogues and workshops.
- We went on to represent the works and developments withinYer Cizenler and OSM-TR in SotM 2018, HOT Summit 2019, SotM 2020, HOT Summit 2020, SotM 2021, and SotM 2022.
- I co-led the coordination for the 2020 Aegean Sea Earthquake which struck Izmir in Turkey. Although the casualties were low, the city experienced relatively high structural damage. Yer Cizenler, with the city coordination council of the union of professional chambers, have supported the post event data collection and management efforts to assess the structural and infrastructural damage.
- In 2022, I joined the Open Mapping Hub Asia-Pacific, one of the regional Hubs of HOT as the OSM Trainer and found the opportunity to utilize my experience with university groups within the Asia-Pacific communities and have led a project to sponsor student clubs in order to support their capacities and knowledge on their way to become part of the greater OSM community.
- Yer Cizenler again coordinated the mapping efforts following the Turkey Earthquakes in 2023. As a result of the effort, more than 9000 contributors have mapped more than 2.2 million buildings and more than 88,000 km of road segments in OSM. With the additional support of satellite image providers, we were able to map the damaged buildings as well, which had become the most downloaded datasets of HDX in 2023.
- I also tried to let more and more students know about what OSM is and throughout my academic career and I’ve tried my best to incorporate OSM in my classroom.
Michael Montani - Q09 Your Community Contributions
I have been focusing on community building since I started mapping back in 2016, and I have always been fascinated by the social component of OSM.
When I was still a university student, I co-founded PoliMappers, the first European YouthMappers chapter. Back at the times we were gathering as a small group of students to explore new tools and ways to contribute open geospatial information, often studying the tools beforehand and teaching to each other after one month or two. We were also among the first ones experimenting with new ways of crowdsourcing OpenStreetMap data, by hosting mapathons remotely connecting with other YouthMappers chapters, sharing knowledge, creating mapping games etc., and I believe PoliMappers has been a good drive in expanding YouthMappers to more chapters across the world.
In 2018, I got awarded of the first round of YouthMappers Research Fellowship programme, in which we were asked as students to propose research projects to increase the understanding on how OpenStreetMap could have been used to support vulnerable populations, that would have been funded by the USAID Geocenter and The World Bank. I proposed a project on using OSM to fight schistosomiasis, a Neglected Tropical Disease, in North Senegal, for which I organised a community mapping (in collaboration with YouthMappers Segou) of villages in the region and collected multispectral signatures via drone of an aquatic vegetation associated with the intermediate host of the parasite driving the disease. Long story short, our Senegalese / Italian research team produced risk maps of the territory, highlighting places where the (previously unmapped) local population could have been most affected by the disease, using OSM, building capacities and awareness of the local communities along the way and showing how OSM could be used for scientific purposes to ecology / automation engineering research environments.
(most links can be found in my manifesto)
Since 2020, I work as a GIS Consultant for the United Nations Secretariat, and in particular for the UN Global Service Centre, the logistics base of the UN. Here I am one of the project managers for the UN Maps programme, involved in providing geospatial services and cartographic products to UN Peacekeeping missions across the world.
My specific role is to coordinate all the activities related to crowdsourcing, meaning gathering voluntary contributions to UN mapping projects, especially towards the completion of basemap information used in military topographic maps. Alongside with me there are projects focusing on the corporate editing, infrastructure maintenance and software development.
While working here, I always ensured that paid contributors in the UN Secretariat, as a big organization editing on OSM, were following OSM community guidelines and do not entertain spooky mapping practices, which in corporate editing usually naturally arise.
I coordinate the activities of the UN Mappers community, which is composed of UN military and civilian personnel, local communities, academia and remote volunteers. I am not a big fan of "community hats" (or corporate branding), and being well aware of small world effects, I know that many of these people are either completely new to OSM or existing community members "with a different hat". But I think that over the years I created a good framework for which a big organization can leverage and contribute data to OSM without being necessarily being a negative threat and, instead, willing to contribute to the benefit of OSM community at large. Especially on an administrative mastodon like the UN.
With the crowdsourcing team, totaling 3 people, we managed to:
- Deliver a free educational platform based on Moodle which contains educational material on OSM. And not the usual "how to map a building" stuff, but complete guides on how to approach for the first time the OSM project, how to interact with the community, how to provide data and detailed explanations of editors, how to validate data interacting with the community, use it on GIS software and so on. All the material is being provided in many languages (including Arabic and Chinese) sometimes helped by volunteer translators, and released under CC-BY-SA. Unfortunately it requires authentication (which lately is also buggy, but IT teams are working on it), but that is unenforceable organizational rules. The learning platform counts 2730 users at the moment.
- Building OpenStreetMap capacities of volunteers worldwide, by hosting mapping events and training courses. We hosted events in EN, FR, ES, PT, IT virtually on all inhabited continents at a rate of 70 events per year over 4.5 years. We got over 5000+ unique OSM users contributing at least once on our projects. We tracked about 6500 event participants across presentations, trainings and mapathons, even if I believe the real outreach to be much higher. In general, we always focused on building strong capacities of few dedicated volunteers rather than aiming at having zillions of non-expert contributors. We trained tens of interns, even remotely, some of which even ended up working with OSM in the public or academic sector.
- To the extent possible, widespread usage of OSM data outside the UN Peacekeeping operations. A successful use case with UNESCO.
- Managing social media communication and organizing conferences. In particular I was able to invite an OSMF Board member to a UN conference for the first time ever, which I believe it was beneficial for the OSMF to understand how much OSM is being used by the UN Secretariat and UN Agencies, Funds and Programmes.
On my spare time I provide some support to OSM Italia community, in particular organization of trainings for not-for-profit associations like the Italian Alpine Club and Italian universities. I have been selected by Wikimedia Italia (which backs OSM activities in the country) to select and certify OSM trainers at the national level, during the first iteration of certification of Wikimedia trainers from Wikimedia Italia. I also regularly translate the weeklyOSM in Italian since many years, together with isoipsa.
I recently joined the OSMF Local Chapters and Communities Working Group for which I used to review a Local Chapter application, and I made several presentations to global and regional SotMs, especially regarding education and community building on OSM, or technical presentations of what I worked on.
Despite my background in Geoinformatics Engineering, I never produced novel software for OSM, but I have expert knowledge of the OSM data model and I am an heavy data user, especially on socially-related data like changesets and history. I regularly interact technically with the friends at HeiGit.
There was a time in which I participated to tagging development conversations and voting, but I just read passively nowadays, as I am more interested on the social side of the data. Tagging discussions are very funny though, keep them going!
Andrés Gómez Casanova - Q09 Your Community Contributions
I have outlined most of my contributions to OSM in the wiki profile. I have been part of the collective effort to strengthen the community, particularly in reactivating the Colombian and LatAm communities. Our periodic meetings and the upcoming SotM LatAm, after a 5-year hiatus, are testaments to our shared commitment I led.
I also want to bring Notathons, a term we created while solving notes in LatAm. These events have allowed us to come together as a community and get to know each other better while mapping in our own countries.
Laura Mugeha - Q09 Your Community Contributions
I started contributing to OpenStreetMap in 2016 while at University, making mapping contributions focused on Kenya. With more contributions, I started learning more about the community and created a YouthMappers chapter at school. Here, I organized some mapathons, training events, and mapping projects. I also interned at Map Kibera, immersing me in the community. In 2017, I attended my first SotM, and the following year, I helped co-create OSM Kenya and served as community coordinator till 2022. We worked with an incredible team to grow from around 8 to hundreds of members, worked on several community projects, and connected with various organizations.
During this time, I also served as a regional ambassador for YouthMappers, supporting chapters in East and Central Africa. This was initially to offer technical support, but then it evolved to focus on DEI(Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) through the Everywhere She Maps Program.
It's been an incredible journey, starting as a quiet mapper and contributing silently from Kenya to assuming more demanding(and not so silent) leadership roles within OSM communities.
In addition to this, I also volunteer with OSM Africa to help organize the regional State of the Map Africa conference and to organize our monthly mapathons. I have also previously been part of the State of the Map Working Group in 2019-2020 & 2024 and the WeeklyOSM team in 2018.
Lastly, every chance I get, I am always advocating for OSM - I have been lucky to present at various global, regional, and local conferences, and 99% of those have either focused on or referenced work related to OSM.
Through these varied contributions, I've strived to not only enhance the map itself but also to strengthen the OSM community, particularly in regions that have been historically underrepresented. My contributions have focused on making OSM more accessible, relevant, and valuable to diverse communities.
Héctor Ochoa Ortiz - Q09 Your Community Contributions
I contribute to WeeklyOSM by helping out with the Spanish translation. I have contributed greatly to the name-suggestion-index repository, creating canonical tagging for brands. I am currently leading the OSM Spain Association revival, after the organization has been in a stale state for years. I have contributed to organizing over 50 OSM local events, including mapping parties, workshops, talks at universities, and humanitarian mapathons. And finally, I have also spoken at several international conferences about my academic work on OSM.
Español
Contribuyo al semanario de OSM (WeeklyOSM) ayudando con la traducción al español. He contribuido en gran medida al repositorio name-suggestion-index, estandarizando etiquetado para marcas. Estoy liderando actualmente la reactivación de la Asociación OSM España, después de que la organización haya estado en un estado de estancamiento durante años. He contribuido a organizar más de 50 eventos locales de OSM, incluyendo fiestas de mapeo, talleres, charlas en universidades y mapatones humanitarios. Y finalmente, también he hablado en varias conferencias internacionales sobre mi trabajo académico en OSM.
Arun Ganesh - Q09 Your Community Contributions
Over my 16 years active in the OSM world, my largest contribution would be directly on map editing, registering over 3,300 mapping days and over 4.5 million edits. This is a combination of both armchair mapping of large-scale features and micro mapping with field surveys on my daily travels. I'm a fairly well-known advocate of OSM in India, being one of the earliest persons to get the project widespread press attention in India by using OSM for several community projects that had a local impact. A recent article gives a brief overview of my journey with maps over the years.
In 2015, when I had over 8 years of OSM mapping experience, I got an opportunity to work with Mapbox who were looking to build one of the earliest data teams involved in large-scale map data improvement of OSM and played a key role in several important software initiatives like the design and development of OSMCHA for data validation.
I'm actively involved with the OSM community in India and am regularly involved with conducting OSM-related workshops as a volunteer. I was part of the organizing committee for SOTM Asia in 2018 and have been a regular part of the program committee of SOTM over the last several years.
I would have given at least 10 talks/workshops at various SOTMs and two keynotes - SOTM Japan in 2015 and SOTM in 2017.
OSM Foundation's board election 2024: official questions
Q01 Motivation and Objectives
| Q02 Conflict of Interest Management
| Q03 Transparency and Accountability
| Q04 Strategic Vision and Sustainability
| Q05 Decision-Making and Collaboration
| Q06 Fundraising and Resource Development
| Q07 Handling Legal and Political Challenges
| Q08 State of the Map
| Q09 Your Community Contributions
| Q10 Promoting Community and Attracting Volunteers
| Q11 Technology and Innovation
| Q12 Data Quality and Protection
| Q13 Perspective on Open Source
| Q14 Perspective on Overture Maps
All board candidates' manifestos
2024 OpenStreetMap Foundation's: Board election - Voting information and instructions - Annual General Meeting
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