These are the answers of the 2020 0SMF board election candidates to the official questions created by our election facilitator, Michael Collinson. The official questions were based on questions by the community. It was up to the candidates to answer all the questions or just a few of them. Our suggestion was to answer all of them. The official answers and questions thereof should be what voters use to judge.

Suggested community discussion period: 2020-11-28 to 2020-12-05 16:00 UTC (when voting opens).

Notes

Order

The ordering follows the order of candidate self-nominations.

Receipt of answers and manifestos

Before deadline: Roland Olbricht, Logan McGovern, Eugene Alvin Villar, Tobias Knerr
After deadline: Michal Migurski (5 hrs), Jean-Marc Liotier (17 hrs), Willy Franck SOB (33 hrs)

Languages

This year one of the candidates provided their manifesto in both French and English. The rest of the candidates will be asked if they want to provide their answers and manifestos in another language. If they are interested to do so, as these will be provided after the official publication date, they will not be added to this page but will be linked from here.

Editing this page

Candidates please do not edit this page. Non-candidates, free to improve/streamline the formatting of the page, without changing the answers. Thank you.

Some abbreviations

DWG = Data Working Group
EWG = Engineering Working Group
GSoC = Google Summer of Code
LCCWG = Local Chapters and Communities Working Group
LWG = Licensing Working Group
OWG = Operations Working Group
SotM = State of the Map
SRE = Site Reliability Engineer
WG = Working Group

Answers and manifesto per candidate

Name	Nationality	Residence	OSMF member since (confirmation)*	OSMuser link	Answers and manifesto per candidate
Tobias Knerr	German	Germany	2009-02-24 (confirmed)	Tordanik (on osm, edits, contrib, heatmap, chngset com.)	Tobias Knerr - Answers and manifesto
Jean-Marc Liotier	French	France	2018-11-06 (confirmed)	Jean-Marc Liotier (on osm, edits, contrib, heatmap, chngset com.)	Jean-Marc Liotier - Answers and manifesto
Willy Franck SOB	Cameroonian	Cameroon	2018-11-15 (confirmed)	sobzeros (on osm, edits, contrib, heatmap, chngset com.)	Willy Franck SOB - Answers and manifesto
Roland Olbricht	German	Germany	2012-08-23 (confirmed)	drolbr (on osm, edits, contrib, heatmap, chngset com.)	Roland Olbricht - Answers and manifesto
Michal Migurski	U.S. + Polish	U.S.	2016-07-28 (confirmed)	migurski (on osm, edits, contrib, heatmap, chngset com.)	Michal Migurski - Answers and manifesto
Eugene Alvin Villar	Filipino	Philippines	2016-12-15 (confirmed)	seav (on osm, edits, contrib, heatmap, chngset com.)	Eugene Alvin Villar - Answers and manifesto
Logan McGovern	U.S.	U.S.	2019-11-24 (confirmed)	LMcGovern (Logan Mc on osm, edits, contrib, heatmap, chngset com.)	Logan McGovern - Answers and manifesto

Answers per question

Your OSM activities

Compiled from http://www.hdyc.neis-one.org as Dec. 7.

**Contribution of candidates**
	Tobias Knerr		Jean-Marc Liotier		Willy Franck SOB		Roland Olbricht		Michal Migurski		Eugene Alvin Villar		Logan McGovern
Username	Tordanik		Jean-Marc Liotier		sobzeros		drolbr		migurski		seav		Logan Mc
Registered	2008-02-12		2009-08-18		2011-06-30		2008-09-03		2007-05-25		2007-07-28		2019-03-16
Type	Casual Mapper (Active)		Heavy Mapper (Highly Active)		Casual Mapper (Rarely Active)		Casual Mapper (Rarely Active)		Casual Mapper (Rarely Active)		Super Mapper (Very Active)		Casual Mapper (Regularly Active)
days / change sets last year	44 /49		181 / 796		1 / 5		7 / 8		0 / 0		137 / 872		24 / 112
Mapping days	786		1079		190		235		104		1614		30
Map changes	51 090		2 801 365		2 345 887		105 265		14 856		751 188		12
OSM Forum	2,582		0		0		0		0		0		0
OSM Wiki	6210		297		0		0		0		1850		0
	Created	Modified	Created	Modified	Created	Modified	Created	Modified	Created	Modified	Created	Modified	Created	Modified
Nodes	24 171	11 362	1 491 151	436 825	1 918 055	32 225	70 258	25 781	2 647	612	223 700	338 291	8 315	2 460
Ways	6 103	5 585	155 458	184 054	181 898	7 192	1 345	1 480	364	1 000	24 884	59 944	1 244	226
Relations	113	306	697	793	86	78	133	1 188	9	6 234	1 269	4 977	0	1

For example:

What brought you to OSM and why are you still part of it now?
What is your OSM user name?
What mapping contributions have you made in the last year?
Are you/have you been a member of any OSMF working groups?
Do you participate with other OSM mappers, for example in a local chapter or in social meet ups?
Have you run anything yourself, such as an OSM-newbie event?
Have you written about OpenStreetMap in the past - for example, in a blog, or on mailing lists, or in a newspaper? Please provide links if you can.
Do you contribute as a software developer?
Have you attended board meetings as a guest?

A01 Tobias Knerr - Your OSM activities

I signed up to OSM in 2008 as Tordanik. I no longer remember where I first discovered the project – it may have been an article in a prominent German computer magazine. At the time, I already was a strong supporter of free software and open content, though, having previously contributed to Wikipedia and Commons, so OSM was right up my alley.

My first edits to OSM involved mapping my home town and university town. For big chunks of them, I did that pretty much from scratch, using local knowledge plus a GPS logger which I had purchased for this purpose. Today, my local area is still the focus of any mapping I do, although my mapping interests have become more specialized (such as 3d mapping, and micro-mapping in general). I've also spent quite a lot of time improving the OSM wiki, and helping out people on the forum, the mailing lists and on help.osm.org.

Throughout the years, I've had the opportunity to explore many facets of our amazing project. Together with the great folks from my local mapper meetup, I've organized mapping parties, taught newbies to use JOSM, presented OSM to students as well as the wider open source community and at industry events, and arranged a cooperation with the town's administration. We hosted the 2017 FOSSGIS conference (the de facto "SotM Germany", with a couple hundred visitors), and I've been a frequent speaker at several OSM events. Some of you may also be familiar with OSM2World, an open-source 3d rendering tool that I maintain as a volunteer developer.

As for foundation matters: I'm a member of the Communication Working Group, doing mostly English-German translation work for the OSMF blog. Having served as mentor and co-admin for OSM's Google Summer of Code participation since 2015, I additionally joined the Engineering Working Group when it was entrusted with managing GSoC. And of course, I was elected to the board of the OSM Foundation in 2018. It has been an intense and exciting time, and I believe we've made good progress as a board and a project – I'll go into more detail in other questions and my manifesto. With your support, I would be happy to serve another term!

A01 Jean-Marc Liotier - Your OSM activities

I started Openstreetmap after calamitous bicycle navigation in Senegal in 2008 and then in Ghana in 2009 – outdated maps, at the wrong scale and with styles unfit for my purposes. I thought there had to be a better way and as a Linux (mostly Debian) user and administrator since the 90’s I logically stumbled upon Openstreetmap and that was love at first sight. I’m still out there, making the maps I would have liked to have and enjoying the discoveries that the pretext of mapping brings to me.

Since 2009, I have accumulated about 2.8 million map changes in 1070 mapping days. Openstreetmap is not just about quantity, but I believe that Openstreetmap data edition is skin in that game, just as much as the publication of Openstreetmap-related free software. Openstreetmap is labor of love by people who share a vision and direct contributions in data and software are the practical proofs of that love. Of course, Openstreetmap Foundation board roles involve no JOSM time nor coding, so they could be handled by non-contributors, but intimate knowledge of the data (through edition or development) is the sole source of Openstreetmap enlightenment and direct contributions in data and software are the proof of the shared values. When it comes to policy decisions, deep understanding and shared values are essential.

My favourite mapping locations are often the most neglected ones, which is just as well because I tend to produce large changesets that would step on people’s toes if they were in busier places. Suburban and rural France, Yaoundé and Douala (Cameroun Openstreetmap was kickstarted by humongous imports of rather old data, so there is a lot of updating to do) for example, but the two areas I’m most proud of are Bamako and the Dakar region, where I believe I produced a critical mass that made a perceptible difference – take a look at object histories there (apart from the mapping-party buildings produced for the sake of gamified statistics, which I loathe touching).

I enjoy what I call “gardening” – I patrol Osmose or OSMCha in my areas of interest, spot fishy changes and start picking up the weeds and opportunistic planting. More than the quantitative glorification of adding, the unglamorous maintenance keeps Openstreetmap’s edge sharp.

My Openstreetmap contributions in Senegal, Mali and Cameroun led me to get to know both locals and foreigners who dwell around the data – I made friends in the process and I’m grateful to Openstreetmap for that. I was privileged to train people in Mali and Senegal in 2016 and that was a highlight of my Openstreetmap experience. Though I have traveled a few times to North America, my center of gravity is clearly Europe, and Africa where I have so far spent time in 25 countries. I believe understanding local context is essential to cartography, so I naturally turned my Openstreetmap activities towards terrain (physical and social) I’m familiar with. Though I enjoy evangelizing and teaching Openstreetmap, I’m not the sort of person you’ll find hanging out at mapping parties – my way of mapping involves personal focus, with social connections mediated through mailing lists (I participate in talk, talk-fr and tagging mostly) and social media (Twitter, Reddit and Hacker News are my favourite watering holes). I promote Openstreetmap there whenever the occasion occurs and I enjoying the occasional frank exchange of views online, in good humor. In the physical world, I like talking shop with anyone friendly and I had much fun doing it at State Of The Map and its French offshoot.

Last time I wrote about Openstreetmap was a few weeks ago, in this somewhat rambling article – and it was also the first I wrote in this format… I should do that more – writing is fun !

A01 Willy Franck SOB - Your OSM activities

What brought you to OSM and why are you still part of it now?
I came to OSM out of motivation, I'm staying here out of conviction.

What is your OSM user name?
Sobzeros

What mapping contributions have you made in the last year?
The most striking is the mapping of land use in Cameroon, the first and only country in Africa to have manually carried out this work by local actors in six months.

'Are you/have you been a member of any OSMF working groups?
NO

Do you participate with other OSM mappers, for example in a local chapter or in social meet ups?
I am the president of OSM Cameroon association that I created in 2013.

Have you run anything yourself, such as an OSM-newbie event?
Every year we organize the SOTM Cameroon and I have also organized the Understanding Risk Cameroon 2019.

Have you written about OpenStreetMap in the past - for example, in a blog, or on mailing lists, or in a newspaper? Please provide links if you can.
Yes several reports indeed, but the publications are in scientific journals so the links are not always active.

Do you contribute as a software developer?
Yes I am a promoter of the OSM-based mapping platform: http://geosm.org . It is now available in 20 African countries and OpenStreetMap France has also recently adopted it. https://www.openstreetmap.fr/osmdata-le-portail-de-la-donnee-osm/

Have you attended board meetings as a guest?
YES

A01 Roland Olbricht - Your OSM activities

What brought you to OSM and why are you still part of it now?

I came to OSM many years ago because all in Germany available maps were awful: Maps that were at least useful for driving directions had no license beyond being printed on paper. Maps (or more precisely: geographical data) for the wildly diverse purposes produced from OSM today were so far away that people hardly dreamed of it.

I stayed because of the fantastic community:
The On-The-Ground rule resolved most potential disputes about the truth. And the decentralized structure encouraged many third party developers to come around with really useful no-nonsense tools. This in turn made mappers the life easier: for many details there is now useful feedback whether the added data makes a difference.

What is your OSM user name?

drolbr for my personal account.
drolbr_mdv for job related activities.

What mapping contributions have you made in the last year?

In my home region, initiated by the Mappertreffen_Dortmund, there is a large movement to get wheelchair routing ready for production. We are all learning a lot of important details: there is no broad agreement on acceptable incline, because wheelchair users substantially vary in their abilities, but there is a much broader agreement on which surfaces are wheelchair acceptable and which not. There are many more details, I'm stopping here before I get lost.

In addition, I'm caring primarly on keeping exisiting data up-to-date. Again, when tackling the task hands-on and appropriately deep, I learned a lot. Did you know that the best predictor whether a region needs resurveying is the ratio of reachable URLs from url tags in to totally mapped unique url tags in that region?

Are you/have you been a member of any OSMF working groups?'

I had been interested in the EWG, but it always made the impression of being inactive. From that point of view, the recent call for members is no surprise.

When the GDPR implementation nudged us, I have written position papers on timestamps and authentication to channel the future GDPR implementation in the direction most helpful for mappers.

There has also been a short encounter with the DWG:
I had tried to help with the Brazilian Turf Wars but had been unable to calm down any of the involved parties. This only heightened my respect for the long term members of the DWG. As a result, I as a board member would not have supported an overruling of the DWG as has happened with the Crimea conflict. OTRS had turned out as highly draining on motivation, thus I left the DWG.

Do you participate with other OSM mappers, for example in a local chapter or in social meet ups?

I have attended several local meetups in my home region, e.g. in Bonn, Cologne, Düsseldorf, Wuppertal and Dortmund. The Corona restrictions basically halted those activities.

I'm a regular speaker at the FOSSGIS conferences. FOSSGIS is the German local chapter of OSM. I also have given talks and workshops at various SotM conferences, and one SotM-US as well as one SotM-FR.

Have you run anything yourself, such as an OSM-newbie event?

I have run various workshops within and outside of OSM related conferences.

Have you written about OpenStreetMap in the past - for example, in a blog, or on mailing lists, or in a newspaper? Please provide links if you can.

Yes, frequently. You will find contributions from me on my project's blog, the wiki, various mailing lists, forum.openstreetmap.org, help.openstreetmap.org, the welcome mat, some diary entries, some position papers, and probably more.

I always factor in the possibility that such an artifact is the first contact of someone with OSM. For that reason I aspire to always encourage and never discourage stakeholders, in particular mappers. And I work hard to stay down with the facts and avoid theorizing or stating strategies.

Some Links:

SotM 2019 (privacy, tagging conflicts, Overpass tools), 2018 (OSM data model), 2016 (indoor routing, keeping OSM up-to-date), 2013
SotM-US 2015, SotM-EU 2014, 2011 - talks and workshops related to Overpass API
the Overpass API manual (in German or French)

Do you contribute as a software developer?

I am the developer and maintainer of the Overpass API.

There are also contributions of me to JOSM, the main page, and several other projects.

Have you attended board meetings as a guest?

Only a few times.
We have nowadays excellent minutes of the meetings, thanks to Dorothea. During the meeting, guests anyway cannot speak up. Thus, reading the minutes is usually the better effort-benefit solution.

A01 Michal Migurski - Your OSM activities

I signed up to OpenStreetMap in 2007 (user: migurski) after working closely with early mappers over the previous year and learning about OSM from other speakers and attendees at open geospatial conferences starting with Where 2.0 in 2005. At the time I was head of technology for Stamen Design. I led Stamen’s participation in OSM on several fronts starting in 2006. We hosted San Francisco’s first mapping parties with Steve Coast, learned and then taught core stack technologies such as Mapnik, created new editing tools like Field Papers (presented as “Walking Papers” at SOTM 2009 in Amsterdam, https://vimeo.com/5593879) to improve the user experience of novice mappers, supported HOTOSM financially in its goal of becoming a registered non-profit, created popular and long-used OSM cartographic contributions like Toner Tiles and Watercolor Maps and applied OSM commercially for clients like Nike and the London Olympics before it was widely seen as a legitimate source of map data.

Since 2009, I have noted and influenced the use of OSM as a core piece of humanitarian infrastructure starting with quarterly exercises in collaboration with the defense community that also included OSMF board members Kate Chapman and Mikel Maron. The 2010 earthquake in Haiti spurred the US community into action and community use of tools like Field Papers carried over to the later establishment of HOTOSM.

In 2012, I was an elected member of the OSM US Foundation board, and have proudly supported OSMUS since our first conference in Atlanta in 2010. I am also a member of three non-profits relevant to OSM. Digital Democracy works in solidarity with marginalized communities to use technology to defend their rights, GreenInfo Network creates, analyzes, visualizes and communicates geospatial information in the public interest, and PlanScore tackles the challenge of making U.S. political redistricting fair and easy to understand. I have recently grown so excited by the large-scale use and expansion of OSM that I joined the Facebook mapping team in 2018 to contribute to OSM’s incredible effort. We support humanitarian users with timely global geographic information through our Data For Good Disaster Maps program, we collaborate with academic institutions like Columbia University on global population density datasets, and we support the popular RapiD AI-assisted editing tool with partners like Esri. Our OpenStreetMap efforts support all of Facebook’s map display needs.

A01 Eugene Alvin Villar - Your OSM activities

I joined OSM in July 2007 and my username is seav, which is the handle that I use for almost all of my online accounts since the late 1990s. It is actually not a surprise that I took to OSM given that I really love maps. To give a bit of a background, three of my intellectual (okay, geeky) hobbies as a kid was reading the encyclopedia (my family owned two editions of the World Book Encyclopedia), poring over atlases and maps (my childhood favorites were a Grolier World Atlas and a huge wall road map of the Philippines), and astronomy. While I wasn't able to channel my childhood passion for astronomy into an adult hobby, my love of encyclopedias has resulted in me becoming a Wikipedian in 2002 and my love of maps into an OSM mapper. I actually have heard of OSM around 2005 but I thought then that it was only a UK/Europe-only project, but when I revisited OSM again in 2007 and saw that it was actually a global project, I was immediately hooked (read my blog post about it: 1).

A lot of the mapping I have done in the past year include improving and fixing errors in the road network in the Philippines (this is as part of my work with Kaart; see my answer to question 1.1.5.), adding or improving administrative boundaries and place nodes in the country, and participating in local projects such as OSMaPaaralan (2), which is a project to map schools in the country.

I joined the OSM Foundation in December 2016 and have attended several Board meetings as a guest. I was able to attend the Local Chapters Congress at State of the Map 2018 and 2019 and subsequently joined the effort to revive the Local Chapters Working Group spearheaded by Joost Schouppe and now renamed as the Local Chapters and Communities WG (LCCWG)(3). I was appointed the Chair of the working group and have continued in that role up to the present.

Aside from mapping, I also spend my OSM-related time helping to grow the OSM Philippines community. This includes managing the various local communication channels such as the talk-ph mailing list and social media groups, and organizing events like mapping parties, lectures, workshops, and conferences. Some of the major events that I helped organize were the State of the Map Philippines 2013(4), State of the Map Asia 2016(5) that was held in the Philippines, and Pista ng Mapa 2019(6) and 2020(7), which is the annual local FOSS4G/OSM conference. In addition to mapping and organizing events, I also use my software development skills to create small tools and scripts for the PH community. This includes a tool to highlight PGS-imported coastlines that needed smoothing(8), a (now-obsolete) imagery coverage map(9), and a script to generate node density map images( 10).

Outside of but related to OSM, I support efforts for greater collaboration and understanding between the OSM and Wikimedia communities. I have given several talks and presentations(11) during State of the Map and Wikimedia events about how Wikimedia and OSM are benefiting from each other and why I think OSM and Wikidata in particular need to be linked with each other.

You can read more about my activities and thoughts on OSM on my OSM diary(12) or my personal blog(13).

A01 Logan McGovern - Your OSM activities

What brought you to OSM and why are you still part of it now?

In early 2019, I attended a job fair where employers were advertising open positions. I remember seeing “Kaart” on the business cards resting on the table. The name sounded odd and piqued my interest. The company’s slogan of “Live locally, work globally” appealed to me. Ultimately, I was hired by Kaart to fill a position on an organized editing team they were assembling. I continue to find this work rewarding and I am a proud employee of Kaart.

What is your OSM username?

I have three OSM accounts. Dalekokarta is my work account. Logan Mc and lmcosmf are my personal accounts. I applied for membership in the OSMF using lmcosmf. The edits that I contribute to OpenStreetMap as Logan Mc are for Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) disaster mapping campaigns. I am a volunteer tasking coordinator for HOT and I have been creating tasking manager projects for the COVID-19 mapping campaign. I was honored with a mention in their September newsletter for my volunteer contributions, which I appreciated.

What mapping contributions have you made in the last year?

To date, under my work username of Dalekokarta, I have contributed approximately 625,000 edits to Mexico, 148,000 edits to Colombia, and 8000 edits to Malaysia. All my contributions to OpenStreetMap as a Kaart employee are related to the road networks of these countries. I am particularly proud of the edits that I made to the road system of Salamanca, Mexico. I have contributed a significantly smaller number of edits to OpenStreetMap using my personal account Logan Mc, most of which are for various HOT disaster mapping campaigns.

Are you/have you been a member of any OSMF working groups?

I have not been a member of any OSMF working groups. Awhile back I expressed interest in the past at volunteering for the OSMF in emails to the communication working group, but ultimately did not follow through because I considered myself too new to the OpenStreetMap community. I will reach out again to see if they need volunteers early next year, provided I am not elected to serve on the board.

Do you participate with other OSM mappers, for example in a local chapter or in social meet ups?
I have been participating in the HOT Covid-19 activation for half a year now. Volunteers participating in the activation were able to attend a weekly video conference for nearly that entire period. I missed two meetings during these past six months, and one was cancelled.

Have you run anything yourself, such as an OSM-newbie event?

I have not directed or organized any events independently

Have you written about OpenStreetMap in the past - for example, in a blog, or on mailing lists, or in a newspaper?

I have not written any public posts about OpenStreetMap

Do you contribute as a software developer?

I have done extremely little in terms of software development. However, I can write applications using the statistical language R, and I am familiar with SQL and Python, but not adept.

Have you attended board meetings as a guest?

I have not attended any OSMF board meetings.

Why you want to be a board member?

What do you think you can achieve as a board member that you can't as a regular OSM(F) member?
What is the most pressing issue the OSMF board should address?

A02 Tobias Knerr - Why you want to be a board member?

When I joined the board two years ago, I made it a priority to strengthen the influence of volunteers in the OSMF. In a project otherwise designed to be distributed and do-ocratic, the OSMF and its board are outliers. They are uniquely positioned to do a lot of good – I'm discussing my ideas for this in other answers – but they are also potentially vulnerable to takeover attempts, an outsized influence of organized groups, and other mechanisms that would upset the balance of power in the project.

I'm happy that we were able to implement many of the immediate measures I had outlined in my 2018 manifesto: Offering OSMF membership to active contributors. Introducing Conflict of Interest rules for the OSMF board. Linking OSMF membership to OSM accounts and paving the way for transparent membership lists based on OSM user names. And, at the upcoming AGM, asking for a mandate for additional protections against takeover attempts and companies' control over their employees' actions within the OSMF.

Still, this is very much an ongoing concern. Some steps are already in the board's pipeline, such as defining membership prerequisites and extending our conflict of interest rules to working groups. Other changes initiated by the board during my current term, especially the creation of additional paid positions within the foundation, will also pose new challenges in this area: We must avoid becoming dependent on any particular source of funding, and ensure that volunteers continue to be first-class citizens in an organization that has employees and contractors working for it. Making progress and adapting to changing technological and social circumstances without abandoning our core values will always be a balance act, and there's a lot of work to be done!

A02 Jean-Marc Liotier - Why you want to be a board member?

By its nature, Openstreetmap is bound to the free software movement and to its politics. In this context, my foremost duty as a board member will be to ensure that Openstreetmap survives and thrives under a copyleft license – such as the current license. As a user, immersed in free software since 25 years and constant in my advocacy of copyleft, I bring a promise of political stability that I believe essential to the continuing success of Openstreetmap. Everything else is accessory to that and can be handled by the working groups: the board should merely be the ultimate keeper of the oath.

The success of Openstreetmap will draw on diversity in many dimensions: individual and corporate, professional and amateur, for-profit and non-profit, all genders, origins and creeds. For that to occur without turning into the clan warfare that our cooperation can easily (and sometimes does) degenerate into and to protect the weak from the strong, the Openstreetmap Foundation must ensure all participant have no doubt about its willingness to enforce its institutional framework in accordance to core values that won’t be diluted for anyone’s convenience. I’ll represent those who support that position.

A classic avenue for gaining influence with an individual or an organization is to make it financially dependent. We heard calls for the Openstreetmap Foundation to fund projects by spending some of its reserves. Indeed, not spending the investor’s money is a gross mistake – for a company in a high-growth market, which the Openstreetmap Foundation isn’t: the hint is in the name, it is a foundation and its purpose is not to burn through capital in a bid to take over the world. Its purpose is to literally be the foundation (in software jargon, a platform) upon which every sort of purpose (including the takeover-the-world startup flavour of the day and the image-driven NGO) can find support and thrive, safe in the knowledge that Openstreetmap abides. The assets of the Openstreetmap Foundation are what guarantees that in practice.

Already two-thirds of the Openstreetmap Foundation’s income is conference sponsorship and corporate membership – they are welcome and corporate interest will take Openstreetmap to yet unknown heights. But, as useful as they are, corporations are no one’s friend – they will eat you if you look appetizing and weak. Openstreetmap does look appetizing – so it can’t afford to look like it might be influenced away from its values by generous offers in times of need. To that purpose, I will advocate focusing the Openstreetmap Foundation’s budget on its core infrastructure and core missions: sustainability is non-negotiable and frugality is the mean to that end – though that doesn’t exclude earmarked donations for non-core projects that might proceed more efficiently through the Foundation.

Warning large donors that the Openstreetmap that donations tied to unacceptable conditions will be refused is only credible if those donations are not Openstreetmap’s lifeline.

A02 Willy Franck SOB - Why you want to be a board member?

What do you think you can achieve as a board member that you can't as a regular OSM(F) member?

I can influence decisions through my experience in the project and participate in a greater outreach to the local community.

What is the most pressing issue the OSMF board should address?

It is the question of its representation with the local communities and the respect of the conditions of use of the OSM license.

A02 Roland Olbricht - Why you want to be a board member?

What do you think you can achieve as a board member that you can't as a regular OSM(F) member?

The board has worked hard to make as much information public as possible, and the current board has an excellent track record in incorporating feedback. Thus, there is little that one can achieve from inside the board only.

However, we need people both to keep this state and push it forwards as well as truly represent the community. One important group are core developers, and Paul Norman had execellently served to represent them so far. As Paul unfortunately does not candidate again, I would like to take over this duty. I'm pretty sue that I can represent some groups of mappers as well as data consumers, but neither of these groups is a homogenous bloc.

What is the most pressing issue the OSMF board should address?

See Alan's diary for an analysis that is up to the point or mid-term to long-term goals.

By contrast, a particular urgent matter is protecting the licensing of our data from the fallout of Brexit.

A02 Michal Migurski - Why you want to be a board member?

I’ve been an excited participant in OpenStreetMap for much of the project’s history because it’s a rare example of a globally-successful open data project. The resulting map has been the best choice for so many areas I’ve worked: cartography, mobility, urban data, humanitarian intervention, and large-scale analysis have all benefited from OSM as a platform.

With 2019’s new active board, OSM is moving further in its transition from a gutsy challenger of copyright-restricted mapping agencies to a victorious critical utility for a wide variety of large and small users. We won! I can help update OSM’s historic organizational methods for its new role.

I offer a unique perspective on OSM needed for this new purpose. The board has decided to actively participate in project direction. We’ll be hiring our first paid engineering staff soon, and my experience supporting engineering teams in commercial and non-profit organizations will be an important addition. I’m also excited to bring experience with map accessibility, humanitarian applications, data consumption, engineering process, and robot-assisted mapping to the board’s decision making process so that we can meet the future head-on.

A02 Eugene Alvin Villar - Why you want to be a board member?

As most of you should already know, I ran for the Board in 2019 but was not elected. The reason why I ran for the Board last year is still the same: the OSMF and especially the Board is lacking in geographic and ethnic diversity. All of the present and past Board members have been white people who are all based or residing in either Europe or Canada/United States. As a global project, I think this lack of geographic and ethnic diversity is a problem on the same level as the lack of gender diversity. While I could not personally improve on gender diversity by running, I hope that the OSMF sees value in the Board having greater representation from the Global South. There have been several OSMF members from Asia, Africa, and Latin America that have run for the Board in the past but unfortunately none have been elected.

What do you think you can achieve as a board member that you can't as a regular OSM(F) member?

Honestly, I do not believe that I am that much less influential as a regular member compared to being a Board member. To give an example, I often point out that the current Active Contributor Membership scheme and the old Fee Waiver scheme only grants associate membership and not regular membership.(1) I did not think that this was fair to mappers who want to become a regular member but couldn't afford the ₤15 fee. I like to think that this has eventually resulted in the upcoming membership resolution vote to amend the Active Contributor Membership scheme to also allow regular membership.

Going back to the question, I do not intend to become a Board member because there are things that I would like the Foundation to work on that I can only do as a Board member. Rather, I would like to become a Board member in order to visibly improve diversity within the Foundation's governance and to be a voice for the Global South.

What is the most pressing issue the OSMF board should address?

I think the Board should continue work on ensuring that the risk of takeover of the Foundation is minimized as much as possible. This is a thorny issue that the Board and the members have been working on but recent changes (such as the Active Contributor Membership scheme) are already a step in the right direction. There are several proposed membership resolutions for the AGM and lots of conversation on the osmf-talk mailing list and the Board should continue work and discussions in this area.

A02 Logan McGovern - Why you want to be a board member?

As a board member, I can help with efforts to inaugurate new local chapters. Outside of Europe, too few OSM communities have formal OSM chapters. Recent successes achieved by the board on this front are very encouraging. Congratulations to Congo-Kinshasa (DRC)! I want to this progress to continue, inducting bringing many more into the fold across the world. It is my hope that more local chapters will help address a host of other concerns, such as the need for a geographically diverse pool of candidates for OSMF board elections. I believe Local chapters are key to expanding the volunteer contributor base, which is the lifeblood of OSM.

The possibility of a hostile takeover of OSMF is an issue that has consumed much energy and attention over the past couple years. I want to help put this issue to rest. It is a priority of mine to support practical efforts to harden the OSMF against hostile takeover, such as minimum requirements in the same vein Tobias Knerr’s proposal from this past October.

Your time

If you are currently a member of a working group, do you plan to continue your role in that working group while on the board? Do you have enough time to commit to multiple roles?

A03 Tobias Knerr - Your time

There's no doubt that board work takes a considerable amount of time and energy. Serving on the board for these past two years has occasionally been challenging, and it has definitely put a limit on the time I was able to dedicate to my other OSM activities, such as working group participation, mapping, and software development. However, I believe it's important for me to continue spending at least some time in those areas – not the least to stay grounded in the practical realities of the project. If I'm re-elected, I plan to continue this overall approach without major changes.

A03 Jean-Marc Liotier - Your time

I am currently in a full-time salaried position, with an employer reasonably flexible about my schedule. I currently have no full time family dependents in my home. Therefore, I’m able to commit to regular participation in Openstreetmap Foundation duties. To that purpose I have scaled down other political commitments and I’m aware that I’ll certainly spend much less time mapping.

A03 Willy Franck SOB - Your time

I am not.

A03 Roland Olbricht - Your time

Currently, I'm not member of any working group.

A03 Michal Migurski - Your time

I currently participate in regular Operations team meetings and expect to continue.

A03 Eugene Alvin Villar - Your time

If elected to the Board, I plan to continue my participation in the LCCWG but would have to step down as Chair. I have observed that the current Board has ramped up its activities and that it is eating up a lot of time. While I plan to continue helping out with the LCCWG, I think that I would likely need to minimize my time in the LCCWG because Board work is more pressing.

A03 Logan McGovern - Your time

No answer.

Do you have any previous relevant experience?

Please describe any experience you have that might help you be a board member. Here are some examples to help you:

Being a board member for OSMF often involves complex negotiation and discussions within the board, with working groups, and with the wider OSM community. Teamwork and the ability to make decisions, listen (truly listen) and hear a diverse set of opinions takes humility, time management, calm process planning, and community-building skills. Do you have an experience where you managed scenarios and conversations that you may not have agreed with and/or that challenged you.
Do you have experience of managing a project or a team of people? Do you have any experience of coaching others to lead (i.e. managing managers)? How long have you been doing these things?
Have you ever managed multiple stakeholders with different agendas? What was the situation? What did you do? What challenges did you face and how did you overcome them?

A04 Tobias Knerr - Do you have any previous relevant experience?

Having been an OSMF board member for two years surely counts as relevant experience. :)

More generally, I believe that there are some traits all board members should share: Love for the OpenStreetMap project, commitment to its values, and the ability to constructively work together in the interest of the OSM community as a whole. Because I've contributed to OSM for over a decade in various roles, I'm confident that I have a decent understanding of how OSM works.

My professional experience is as a researcher and software developer. The mode of collaboration I enjoy most is teamwork among equals, built on trust, competence and mutual respect more so than formal authority. I'm not a manager, nor do I want to be. I highly value what my board colleagues with leadership experience in traditional organizations bring to the table, but at the same time, I don't believe that this is the only perspective which should be represented on the foundation board. OSM's community and core values set it apart, and we should not unthinkingly copy patterns found in hierarchical organizations.

A04 Jean-Marc Liotier - Do you have any previous relevant experience?

My academic background is in business administration, which will find itself right at home in the many dimensions (finance, accounting, marketing, legal, procurement etc.) of the Openstreetmap Foundation’s interests.

My profession for the last twenty years has been the management of information systems projects for network operators. I believe that my understanding of the software industry from strategic level to software development and my current roles in project management and product ownership will let me interact on firm footing with all possible stakeholders around the Openstreetmap foundation. My full CV is available here.

Active in local politics and as an employee representative within a union, I have direct experience of the sort of work and mindset required to form shared understanding and take collective action.

I’m entirely comfortable with the English language, French is my native tongue and I have struggled with German long enough to have been happy to discover that it was actually of some practical use in SOTM Heidelberg (mostly for ordering drinks) – but don’t expect me to handle Openstreetmap conversation on the German mailing lists.

A04 Willy Franck SOB - Do you have any previous relevant experience?

I created my first association at the age of 13! so very early I was immersed in the management of people and projects. Throughout my professional career, I have also been very often at the head of organizations where I had to lead negotiations with concrete results.

A04 Roland Olbricht - Do you have any previous relevant experience?

Bluntly, I do not buy this list of examples. The core mission of the board is to represent the community, i.e. for every mapper here must be one or multiple board members that they trust to speak to and ask to bring forward their interests within the OSM project.

A04 Michal Migurski - Do you have any previous relevant experience?

I have held a series of engineering and product management jobs in organizations dedicated to open data or mapping in some form. In my current role at Facebook as engineering manager, we are expected to let engineers decide direction and implementation while helping clear obstacles from their path. Our approach is compatible with OSM’s plan to allow engineering staff and volunteers to decide what’s important and to provide adequate support for them to reach their goals.

In my personal time, I also work with a group of political scientists and legal experts on PlanScore.org, a political geography project to reduce the harm of partisan redistricting in U.S. politics. The key challenge of our work has been to make novel social science work accessible to journalists and politicians. Each of us on the team comes to the work with a distinct set of skills and points of view, and we’ve succeeded in aligning goals and schedules to meet everyone’s publishing and collaboration needs.

A04 Eugene Alvin Villar - Do you have any previous relevant experience?

I mentioned in my answer to question #1 that I have been a Wikipedian since 2002. One of the skills I learned by being a long-time Wikipedian is to discuss issues and disagreements respectfully and civilly on Wikipedia talk pages. This includes avoiding ad hominem attacks (focusing on the issues at hand instead of the person talking), and being as diplomatic as possible. In addition, I have served on the Board of Trustees of Wikimedia Philippines, a local chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation, from 2010 when the chapter was founded until 2017. During my time on the Board, I have taken on various positions including Chairperson, President, and Secretary, and I have had my fair share of interpersonal conflicts including having to expel a member who acted maliciously against another member (the Board held a hearing and decided to expel that member based on our policies), respectfully voicing disagreements with the Wikimedia Foundation regarding their actions and/or policies, and mediating between our Treasurer and a project lead regarding issues on disbursement of project funds. I also had the experience of being a project lead that involved managing a group of volunteers.

On the OSM side, I am currently the Chair of the OSMF Local Chapters and Communities Working Group and I have done my best to lead and steer the group in completing our tasks.

A04 Logan McGovern - Do you have any previous relevant experience?

My relevant experience includes working with a diverse group of employees as part of the same team for the past two years. We routinely critique each other’s work, and everyone must be receptive to this, as this serves our goal of maintaining a high standard of quality in our OSM contributions. This requires effective communication and active listening skills. We hold each other accountable. Disagreements occur, but are articulated respectfully, as we work towards a meaningful consensus. I would do the same as a board member.

Transparency: Conflicts of interest

A. Is your main source of income related to mapping or GIS work in some way, (whether OSM-related or not)?

B. Are you an employee of, member of, or otherwise affiliated with (paid or non-paid) a company, government organization or non-profit that does work in the OSM ecosystem or might compete with it? Do you have any contracts (employment or otherwise) which would limit what you can say in public that are relevant to OSM? eg a non-disparagement clause with a company/org in the OSM ecosystem? Or an employment contract which commits you to "always work in the company's best interest"?

A05 Tobias Knerr - Conflicts of interest

I'm participating in OSM as a volunteer in my spare time. For my main source of income, I work as a researcher at the University of Passau, mostly on projects related to the automotive industry and self-driving cars. Map data does play a role here, so although we aren't involved with OSM, some conflicts of interest are possible.

I'm also a member of the OSMF local chapter in Germany. Otherwise, I'm not affiliated with any of the organizations which do work in the OSM ecosystem. My communications and actions as a board member are not limited by any relevant contracts.

A05 Jean-Marc Liotier - Conflicts of interest

My sole source of income is the salary I draw from SFR, a French telecommunications operator. Some of our suppliers (ESRI for example) may be participants in the Openstreetmap ecosystem.

A05 Willy Franck SOB - Conflicts of interest

A. Is your main source of income related to mapping or GIS work in some way, (whether OSM-related or not)?
Yes

B. Are you an employee of, member of, or otherwise affiliated with (paid or non-paid) a company, government organization or non-profit that does work in the OSM ecosystem or might compete with it? Do you have any contracts (employment or otherwise) which would limit what you can say in public that are relevant to OSM? eg a non-disparagement clause with a company/org in the OSM ecosystem?
NO

Or an employment contract which commits you to "always work in the company's best interest"?
In the context of my activity I contribute to OSM and I also enrich my solutions thanks to OSM.it's almost a religion for us.

A05 Roland Olbricht - Conflicts of interest

A. Is your main source of income related to mapping or GIS work in some way, (whether OSM-related or not)?

Almost not at all.

My day job is to write software to issue public transit tickets in an interoperable yet secure way. My employer is also a heavy user of OSM data in other settings, and I'm consulting colleagues on more complex OSM matters.

B. Are you an employee of, member of, or otherwise affiliated with (paid or non-paid) a company, government organization or non-profit that does work in the OSM ecosystem or might compete with it? Do you have any contracts (employment or otherwise) which would limit what you can say in public that are relevant to OSM? eg a non-disparagement clause with a company/org in the OSM ecosystem? Or an employment contract which commits you to "always work in the company's best interest"?

I have no relations to any organization that competes with OSM.
My current employer is a user of OSM data. In that contract, there are no explicit restrictions: The company is organized in a way such that it has anyway as few business secrets as possible. A side note is that protecting valid privacy concerns of collegues (and, by the way, any mapper or other stakeholder in OSM) by contrast of course applies.

A05 Michal Migurski - Conflicts of interest

I am employed full-time as an engineering manager on Facebook’s Spatial Computing team, where I interact regularly with mapping-related activities undertaken by the company, such as our map editing efforts and our long-running AI and machine learning work.

My Facebook (FB) obligations encourage me to work in the best interests of the OSM project. Facebook has been a consistent supporter of the OSM community, growth of the project, and OSM’s ODbL license strategy. FB is a major user of OSM data in public-facing display maps throughout our many products. My candidacy for the OSMF board has been vetted by communications and legal representatives at Facebook.

A05 Eugene Alvin Villar - Conflicts of interest

From late June 2020 until the first week of December, one of my main sources of income was as a contractor for Kaart, a Bronze Corporate Member of the OSM Foundation. My task was to help improve the OSM road network data in the Philippines. You can see my Kaart-related edits in OSM under my username (seav) with the #Kaart (or similar) changeset hashtag. I have previously disclosed this potential conflict of interest to the rest of the LCCWG in our July 2020 monthly meeting.(1)

That said, it is very fortunate that the goals of Kaart in improving OSM is very much aligned with the goal of the Foundation in making the best map of the world possible. I wouldn't have accepted this Kaart position if that weren't the case. And based on the terms of my contract, I do not have any obligation to work in the company's best interest to the detriment of OSM in general.

A05 Logan McGovern - Conflicts of interest

As a paid GIS technician for Kaart, all my income is derived from contributing edits to OSM. I also volunteer for HOT, a nonprofit humanitarian organization that uses OSM to create geographic datasets critical to disaster relief efforts. Kaart and HOT are both contributors, not competitors with OSM. As a Kaart employee, I am bound by a nondisclosure agreement that limits what I can share regarding company operations. However, my work profile is public, and my mapping contributions can also be viewed by anyone. I will recuse myself from any situation that is or may be perceived as a conflict of interest with my current employer and position. In addition, Kaart has no intention of using the OSMF board as a vehicle to further its own interests.

YOUR VIEW

What to do with the face to face meeting in Corona times?

The Board has a tradition to do an expenses-paid two day face-to-face meeting soon after the election, with a focus on agenda-setting for the rest of the year. Since there will be many new members, it also offers a chance to get to know each other better. Do you think this is a good idea? Should this be rather replaced by a video conference, given the uncertainties for travelling in the next year?

A06 Tobias Knerr - What to do with the face to face meeting in Corona times?

Due to the pandemic, we decided to replace the board's face to face meeting in spring 2020 with a video conference. I'm convinced this was the right call, and that the first such meeting after the election should be virtual as well.

My first-hand impression as a board member is that this year's virtual events have been, for the most part, just as productive as the previous face to face meetings. And the lower barrier for organizing a virtual event that has made it easy for us to hold a second such meeting in 2020.

So although I would greatly enjoy meeting my fellow board members in person (again), I do think we can learn from this year's experiences: Given the greater cost and environmental impact, as well as the logistics that will only grow more challenging as the board becomes more geographically diverse, not every such meeting needs to be in person - even once the threat of COVID19 is behind us. (Fingers crossed!)

A06 Jean-Marc Liotier - What to do with the face to face meeting in Corona times?

Face-to-face meetings bond participants in a way that videoconferencing cannot reproduce, but we are all experienced with coping with the lack of it – and we shall continue for a while. Planning shall of course be updated as the sanitary conditions change.

A06 Willy Franck SOB - What to do with the face to face meeting in Corona times?

I am aware that we will be able and we will find the tricks from a distance to get to know each other better although nothing replaces physical contact. We must rise to the challenge of COVID by reinventing new ways of working.

A06 Roland Olbricht - What to do with the face to face meeting in Corona times?

I strongly suggest a video conference:
Many mapping has been stifled by lockdowns, thus travelling to mostly make good vibes will inevitably look disproportionate through the eyes of affected mappers.

A06 Michal Migurski - What to do with the face to face meeting in Corona times?

It’s vital for the board to meet face-to-face as often as practical, at minimum once per year but ideally more. A decision to meet by video will need to be made in response to public health guidance and pandemic response. I expect that meetings and conferences will continue to take place over video until the middle of 2021 at the earliest.

A06 Eugene Alvin Villar - What to do with the face to face meeting in Corona times?

As long as there are lockdowns in effect in significant portions of the world, I think it would be irresponsible to have a face-to-face meeting. So I would only support it only if it is very safe to do so and does not result in any inconvenience (such as mandatory quarantine times for a Board member). Given that the current Board already had two screen-to-screen meetings, the general sentiment I received was that these types of meetings are almost as good as the face-to-face meetings.

A06 Logan McGovern - What to do with the face to face meeting in Corona times?

I do not support holding a face-to-face meeting currently, due to the ongoing global pandemic. I think there is tremendous value in face-face meetings, but the risk does not outweigh the reward. Meeting by video conference is a good alternative.

What's the use of the OSMF ?

From the point of view of a small contributor, how does the OSMF helps me and could improve my "work conditions" ?

A07 Tobias Knerr - What's the use of the OSMF ?

The most fundamental purpose of the OSMF is to keep the lights on: To make sure the technical and legal infrastructure OSM depends on is running smoothly. There needs to be computer hardware somewhere for our map data to live on, for example, and the OSMF was set up to be the entity dealing with those necessities.

But there are ways in which the OSMF can and does serve the OSM community beyond that baseline:

Stand up for the community's interests in dealings with other organizations. At times, a loosely organized collection of individuals can have a hard time making its legitimate concerns heard when facing more coordinated groups such as large corporations. Whether it's, say, an organized editing campaign gone wrong or missing attribution, the OSMF is often in a stronger position to communicate and enforce the community's expectations.
Fund software infrastructure. Most software development in the OSM ecosystem is handled by separate groups, including a considerable number of companies building products on top of OSM data. This vibrant software ecosystem is one of our greatest assets! However, not every software project enjoys a viable business model. There are tools such as editors, open source libraries, and our API and website, which make OSM better for everyone but cannot easily capture that value. The OSMF can help make these projects sustainable. For you, this could mean that the OSMF funds the development of new features e.g. in your favorite OSM editor.
Help contributors connect with each other. It's important to have shared spaces where OSM's global community can interact, and the OSMF is in a good position to provide these. Most of you are already using some of our channels to talk to other members of the community and stay informed about what's going on. Going forward, I hope the OSMF will be able to offer even more attractive platforms, and better tools for local chapters and communities to organize themselves.

Of course, the above is not an exhaustive list. There are many other examples, such as our recently launched Microgrants program. Throughout all of this, the guiding principle is that the OSMF supports, but does not control, the OSM project. The foundation wants to help the project succeed, but what success means is defined by the community.

A07 Jean-Marc Liotier - What's the use of the OSMF ?

The OSMF guarantees that Openstreetmap remains Openstreetmap.

A07 Willy Franck SOB - What's the use of the OSMF ?

Allowing active contributors to be OSMF members is a good thing. Now it will also be necessary to promote actions that highlight the communities.

A07 Roland Olbricht - What's the use of the OSMF ?

The OSMF hosts the data, both technically and legally. It also hosts a bunch of tools to build the community. The OSMF encourages on purpose third parties to develop further tools: each best idea of hundreds of smart peoply are for sure better than the ideas that of team of only seven persons can come up with.

A07 Michal Migurski - What's the use of the OSMF ?

OSMF helps small contributors in three ways: maintaining continuity of operations, keeping communications channels accessible, and encouraging participation from new communities.

Without a functioning API service and database, work conditions for small contributors would quickly become impossible. OSMF’s commitment to hiring a senior site reliability engineer will keep the map’s technical operations running smoothly and serving a large community of mappers.

Small contributors use a range of communication channels to talk with one another. Certain core channels like the Talk list, the annual general meeting, and the yearly State of the Map conference provide opportunities for the small contributors to learn from one another. These venues should be kept free of abuse or gatekeeping so they will remain attractive and accessible to mappers.

The OSMF should further ensure that core channels are open to diverse participants and newcomers. Small contributions to OSM, like mapping a hometown, are often initially motivated by personal interest but sustained by awareness of a larger mission. New participants from different geographies bring new facets to that mission that make the existing activities of small mappers more meaningful.

A07 Eugene Alvin Villar - What's the use of the OSMF ?

Given that the OSMF is the most influential body in the OSM ecosystem, the OSMF has a lot of power to help small contributors. Examples include the microgrant program to help mappers implement exciting projects and the ability to spend funds to improve the reliability and stability of the infrastructure (by hiring a SRE, for example). A lot of the work that helps mappers are actually done within the working groups. For instance, the Data Working Group is there to help resolve disputes between mappers, while the Local Chapters and Communities Working Group is there to support the growth of local mapping communities.

A07 Logan McGovern - What's the use of the OSMF ?

OSMF serves as the final adjudicator for concerns and disputes of community members over the direction of the OSM project. Everyone is welcome to volunteer their ideas. The OSMF supports the health of the project in all respects: technical, financial, legal, operational, and social. The foundation is key to ensuring OpenStreetMap remains an accessible and free resource to all.

What will you do to build a worldwide community of mappers?

A08 Tobias Knerr - What will you do to build a worldwide community of mappers?

The foundation has seen substantial progress in recent years: In 2020, we were able to welcome the first OSMF local chapters from North and South America, Oceania and Africa. Zero-cost membership for active contributors has been successfully introduced and has lead to a signficant influx of members in some parts of the world that were previously under-represented – and a community of mappers around the globe is a direct prerequisite for creating a map of the world from local knowledge. Most importantly, this development isn't limited to just the foundation: Map contributions, which are ultimately a far more important metric than foundation membership, show an encouraging upward trend around the world.

So even though there is still a long way ahead, I believe things are going pretty well, and I would not advocate for drastic course corrections. Instead, there are many smaller improvements that the foundation can make for the benefit of communities around the world. These include:

Supporting and giving visibility to local groups and events, both for outreach and to foster closer ties between contributors who are looking for this kind of experience. After the pandemic, this would also include real-world meetups, mapping parties and conferences.
Attractive and open online communication tools, such as modern forum and chat platforms, offered by the OSMF for all language communities, building on the work of OWG and the FOSS Committee.
Through the Communications Working Group, putting a spotlight on OSM's success stories around the world, and improving the discoverability of community content on the OSM website.
Assisting our local chapters, who are best positioned to meet the specific needs of their national and regional communities, actively involving them tasks such as moderation, and welcoming additional chapters into the fold.

A08 Jean-Marc Liotier - What will you do to build a worldwide community of mappers?

People who need to focus their time and energy towards survival and will contribute only if they see directly profit are structurally under-represented – which is a major fault line in the community. As a result of different motivations, Openstreetmap practice will differ locally. I do not have ready-made solutions for how to ensure that they are part of the global chorus, but I’m aware of the problem and I have witnessed it locally in Africa. I salute the work of the Local Chapters and Communities Working Group, and will encourage their efforts.

A08 Willy Franck SOB - What will you do to build a worldwide community of mappers?

It is necessary to promote local champions, then create synergies with other local actors and make OSM an essential tool for digital tranformation.

A08 Roland Olbricht - What will you do to build a worldwide community of mappers?

My answer is my manifesto, because the task is the core mission of the OSMF.

A08 Michal Migurski - What will you do to build a worldwide community of mappers?

Encouraging new members from new geographies or populations to join is the best way to expand OSM’s worldwide community. I hope that my focus on participant diversity will open OSM to additional contributors from under-represented communities. As a board member, I’ll also be in a position to directly encourage newcomers to volunteer for WG roles or run for future board seats.

A08 Eugene Alvin Villar - What will you do to build a worldwide community of mappers?

I believe I am already currently doing that through my work in the Local Chapters and Communities Working Group (LCCWG). For example, I helped organize and hosted the recent Local Chapters and Communities Congress 2020(1) that brought together mappers and community leaders from around the world to share best practices and talk about tools and processes to help local communities grow further and be more cohesive.

If I am elected to the Board, I will continue to advocate for the activities and initiatives of the LCCWG on the Board level. (To give some perspective, Joost Schouppe, a current Board member (who would be stepping down this year) and also a LCCWG member is the LCCWG's "champion" within the Board and was there to highlight and share the work that the WG has done to the other Board members.)

A08 Logan McGovern - What will you do to build a worldwide community of mappers?

It will be my mission to support plans and efforts to inaugurate new local chapters across the world. I will go to great lengths to be accessible if elected, and pledge devote a regular portion of my time, at least 4 hours every week, to direct and open communication with OSM community members. I want to hear from everyone, from local chapter leaders, humanitarians, regular mappers, OSM software developers and everyone in between. Input from all parties result in better proposals and decisions.

What will you do to encourage more women leaders in OSM working groups and governance?

A09 Tobias Knerr - What will you do to encourage more women leaders in OSM working groups and governance?

I feel that any significant and sustainable change in our community's demographics has to start with the volunteer community – with more women donating their spare time to build an open map of the world. It certainly would be a huge benefit for OSM to unlock this largely untapped potential of contributors. But honestly, I don't have any revolutionary ideas on how to achieve this, especially as a look at similar projects suggests that the causes may not be unique to OSM. Nevertheless, 2020 has seen some attempts by the board to improve the situation. The adoption of the Diversity Statement was an important symbolic step in this regard. And eventually, this year's creation of the Diversity and Inclusion Special Committee, which we plan to reinvigorate after a slow start, may result in more tangible improvements. At the very least, I hope it would lead to a better understanding of the situation, including some of the less frequently studied dimensions of diversity.

A09 Jean-Marc Liotier - What will you do to encourage more women leaders in OSM working groups and governance?

No answer.

A09 Willy Franck SOB - What will you do to encourage more women leaders in OSM working groups and governance?

in a more global way we need to have a strategy on this problem. A simple answer to a question will not be enough.

A09 Roland Olbricht - What will you do to encourage more women leaders in OSM working groups and governance?

Remark: There are legit interests of LGBT people to get leadership as well. I refuse to restrict this to women.

As a first step, we should be bluntly honest: We as OSM have no idea what is actually keeping people from candidating for positions. Or electing them: all elected candidates last year were male despite at least on female candidate. Or contributing in general.

Honestly again, I consider the lack of diversity primarly as a missed opportunity of growth and resilience. There are probably many people out there who both can and want to engage with OSM, even if rather as a mean than an end. Our community probably could triple if we get those people involved and excited.

Various things have been tried, but we have not seen any significant progress, even after years. Again, we don't know whether we are doing not enough of the initiatives or simply not the right things. It is time to compare to other similar organizations and settings that attract minorities better, and to scrutinize whether we can learn from them. The gender ratio of math students in Germany has been eased to be almost balanced, many years after it was discovered that school teachers actively and massively talked down girl's math competences. In that case, the true origin of the problem has been entirely outside the institution where the problem has been observed. Surveying means going out on the street, and going out is not balanced on gender. Another thing is whether it is socially acceptable and subsequently economically viable to spend spare time on long term goals, and OSM is a marathon, not a sprint.

A09 Michal Migurski - What will you do to encourage more women leaders in OSM working groups and governance?

No answer.

A09 Eugene Alvin Villar - What will you do to encourage more women leaders in OSM working groups and governance?

By encouraging more women to join local communities and promoting their work. For instance, I am the programme lead for Pista ng Mapa 2020, a local open mapping conference for OSM and FOSS4G volunteers, and I specifically devoted a section in the programme(1) to highlight the experiences women from the Geoladies PH community (along with MapBeks, the LGBTQI+ mapping community).
By encouraging more women to join the OSM Foundation. While I did not specifically target women, I helped spread the word about the Active Contributor Membership scheme in the Asia and PH Telegram groups and the PH Facebook group(2) in order to have more people from underrepresented communities (and hopefully more women) as members of the OSM Foundation.
By encouraging women to join working groups and to run for the Board.
More importantly, by listening to and addressing the concerns of women. An often repeated concern is that communication channels in the OSM community can sometimes become very toxic and that this discourages many people, including a lot of women, from speaking out or fully participating. Just because one doesn't see any problem doesn't mean that there isn't an actual problem. We should find ways to make the wider OSM community as welcoming as possible.

A09 Logan McGovern - What will you do to encourage more women leaders in OSM working groups and governance?

I know extremely capable women who work for organizations involved in some capacity with OpenStreetMap. Every one of them would make excellent board members. I will personally reach out and encourage those that are interested to run for a seat on the board. I support having the board publicly commend women who distinguish themselves in the OpenStreetMap community for their dedication, leadership, and ingenuity. I support making such commendations routine.

Should OSMF accept funding/donations by companies or organisations which do not want to be disclosed to the public?

Background links for context, added at the time of answers' publication:

A10 Tobias Knerr - Should OSMF accept funding/donations by companies or organisations which do not want to be disclosed to the public?

No. Withholding the donor's identity from the membership would be incompatible with our commitment to transparency, and the foundation has rejected such offers in the past. We generally welcome corporate donations, but community oversight is an essential part of the protections against undue influence over the project.

A10 Jean-Marc Liotier - Should OSMF accept funding/donations by companies or organisations which do not want to be disclosed to the public?

The Openstreetmap Foundation shall be transparent. As finance is power, the transparency requirement applies especially. If transparency is a problem for some, they are welcome to fund Openstreetmap-related projects through a channel that will accept opacity.

A10 Willy Franck SOB - Should OSMF accept funding/donations by companies or organisations which do not want to be disclosed to the public?

It is preferable that OSMF remains transparent as long as possible. Transparency is the glue that binds trust.

A10 Roland Olbricht - Should OSMF accept funding/donations by companies or organisations which do not want to be disclosed to the public?

The asset of the OSMF is the mapper's trust. Thus there must be under no circumstances any doubts that the loyality of the OSMF is to the mappers and not any donors.

On the other hand, a third party can disguise the true source of money anyway, because our legal systems at large works that way. Can we know whether the money from the Pineapple fund is actually a donation from crimials through Bitcoin? We do not know. However, the community is confident that no influence has taken place along the flow of the money, thus this donation is fine.

If a notorious attribution infringer would have funded a law clinic how to get the attribution requirement out of the license and wants to influence OSM for a license change, then this is clearly unacceptable. Tha same applies if we grow the OSMF recurring expenses to a point where we depend on the donations of notorious attribution infringers. Many other cases will lie in between.

A10 Michal Migurski - Should OSMF accept funding/donations by companies or organisations which do not want to be disclosed to the public?

No answer.

Editing conflicts

The development of the iD editor has been classically contentious. Folks put a lot of the their time into development but made controversial tagging decisions. Do you think that they are right? What role should the OSMF and OSMF board have because it now pays an iD developer?

A11 Tobias Knerr - Editing conflicts

Developing the OSM editor that will be many people's first mapping experience is not an easy position to be in. For the most part, I believe iD is doing an absolutely impressive job in offering a polished interface and a gentle learning curve, which are important virtues for the default editor on osm.org.

That being said, not all of the prominent controversies were an inevitable result of iD's role or the genuine ambiguities and unresolved problems OSM tagging is suffering from. Some could have been avoided by sticking to tagging backed by sufficient community consensus, or by a less divisive communication style. And not all controversies were tagging-related, either. For example, I find it unfortunate that the Community Index still recommends proprietary social media channels over OSM's own platforms unless that behavior is explicitly overriden by a local community, and that iD is relying on Facebook for brand images despite the privacy implications.

Now, I want to emphasize that controversies along those lines would not justify OSMF involvement for most software projects in the OSM ecosystem. You do not need to cooperate with the foundation to develop software which uses or creates OSM data. And even with financial support by the foundation, we're explicitly looking for people and projects capable of producing results without close supervision.

Instead, I'd say the key reasons for OSMF to pay particular attention to iD (as with the software dispute resolution panel) are its position as the default editor – a privilege ultimately granted by the OSMF, and a notable difference compared to tools that mappers must actively seek out – and its inclusion on the osm.org website which exposes the OSMF to legal concerns such as copyright or privacy. More generally, there's also a certain level of responsibility that comes with write access to the editing API, especially with editors increasingly abstracting tagging decisions away from the mapper.

A11 Jean-Marc Liotier - Editing conflicts

No answer.

A11 Willy Franck SOB - Editing conflicts

One of OSMF's missions must be to ensure the stability of the strategic tools that are essential to contributing to OSM. Although based on voluntary updates and contributions, it would be good to fund development for the transition from one version to another and according to the "commits" to motivate people who daily contribute their time and skills to enhance the platforms.

A11 Roland Olbricht - Editing conflicts

See a potential way out. The software resolution panel is a prospective attempt. With regard to contrained organizational resources, we should now proceed to get this thing up and running before trying something else.

A11 Michal Migurski - Editing conflicts

Tagging decisions must be separated from iD software development. It’s not sustainable for the engineers building iD to also be forced to rule on complex and evolving cultural decisions like tags. The board should ensure that default tags used in the iD editor on the project homepage are governed by a community process that’s parallel to and separate from the engineering and design of iD itself.

A11 Eugene Alvin Villar - Editing conflicts

My view is that OSM editors ought to follow tagging practices that the community has agreed on. While software developers are themselves part of that same community, I disagree with the combative behavior some developers have exhibited when the larger community has pushed back on the editor's tagging decisions. (See also my reply to a similar question from last year.(1)

I think that the role of the OSMF/Board is to provide a venue or mechanism for mediation and dispute resolution. For instance, I think that it was a great idea that the Board had a face-to-face conversation with one of the iD developers during State of the Map 2019 to try and find solutions. I also applaud the current Board for proposing the creation of a software dispute resolution panel. (See related question below.)

A11 Logan McGovern - Editing conflicts

I am not fully informed of all the concerns associated with the development of ID editor, but I support the inclusion of user input in the software development process, particularly tagging decisions. I support the board having a clear and timely appeal process to resolve conflicts.

How many paid staff should the OSMF have and why?

Background links for context, added at the time of answers' publication:

2020-09 Hiring of Quincy Morgan to work on iD for OSMF.
Decision to hire a Senior Reliability Engineer.
- 2020-08 Funding and hiring for Site Reliability Engineering position
- 2020-07 Proposal to hire a senior site reliability engineer. Discussion with membership.
2020-07 Adopted Hiring Framework. The draft was sent for membership consultation (osmf-talk* thread) from 15 to 30 July 2020.
- 2020-05 Hiring policy board discussion during mid-month board chat, Board's email to membership: "Framework for the foundation's hiring practices", Board's email to Advisory Board: "Framework for the foundation's hiring practices", Related meeting of the board with Corporate representatives on the Advisory Board
- 2020-03 Board discussion: Hiring session during board's 2020 screen-to-screen meeting, Dialogue with OSM System Administrators during board's 2020 screen-to-screen meeting

A12 Tobias Knerr - How many paid staff should the OSMF have and why?

Over the past months, the OSMF board has substantially increased the amount we spend on paid work. While the absolute number of paid positions is still small compared to some other organizations, this nevertheless marks a significant change. The potential benefits for the continued stability of the OSM platform are evident, and experience shows that major projects from the open source and open data worlds tend to eventually come to rely on paid work to an extent (although professional contributors need not necessarily be employed by a single organization). Important work is sometimes neither fun nor inherently profitable, and payment can ensure that it still gets done reliably.

At the same time, there are serious risks involved with creating paid positions. Increased spending makes the OSMF dependent on the goodwill and financial support of wealthy backers. The group(s) within the OSMF who decide on fund allocation wield a substantial amount influence, and so do the people holding paid positions themselves, through access to core infrastructure and as a consequence of spending far more time on shaping the project than others possibly can. Compounding all this is the difficulty in going back to volunteer work once we've created a paid position for a particular task.

Therefore, I believe that the foundation should limit itself to a relatively small number of employees or long-term contractors, who would be working primarily on our core systems and critical administrative tasks. For anything else, we should give preference to contract work, which allows us to obtain certain expertise such as accounting or legal services when needed, or support community projects such as software development without creating a permanent position. Even there, we should proceed cautiously. The board's decision to assist some of our overburdened volunteers with paid work is quite recent, and we need to take the time to evaluate whether it was a good move. There are also considerations such as the appropriate level of pay across national boundaries which we haven't properly addressed.

Perhaps even more important than the number of paid positions are the guardrails we put in place. To me, that includes forgoing paid management or leadership positions. We should preferably recruit long-term community members who understand and respect the project's principles, and have proven that they can work without close supervision and openly cooperate with volunteers rather than through employee-only back channels. We should pay close attention to transparency, guarantee community involvement in the definition of new paid positions, and nurture loyalty to the project as a whole rather than the foundation or board. If you've read the Hiring Framework adopted by the board, you'll be familiar with these and similar points. This is not a coincidence, as I was deeply involved with the creation of that document, and consider it a good foundation for our next steps.

A12 Jean-Marc Liotier - How many paid staff should the OSMF have and why?

Some services are better performed by commercial offerings – take hosting for an obvious example, or electricity supply for a ridiculously obvious one. So let’s not have doctrinal opposition to them. Beyond the evident resiliency requirement of financial independence that shall keep the Openstreetmap Foundation frugal, there are make or buy decisions – which are tied to asset specificity, the degree to which they concern what makes Openstreetmap unique: the database and its API for example. Whether these assets are are produced entirely by volunteers or with assistance from commercial services, it is the responsibility of the foundation to ensure that working groups remain fully in control. That means there must be no vital dependency on external staff - homeostasis must be borne by the working groups as collectives. With those precautions, I have no doctrinal objection to the enlisting of contractors and services - on retainer or as needed in support of volunteers, depending on whether the need recurs regularly.

Not becoming vitally dependent on external staff on a commercial basis means retaining skilled volunteers in those hands operational control must remain. That requires extra care in giving them the proper consideration and agency that makes them uniquely valuable contributors and not mere free labor. It is one more reason for the board to defer to the working groups, under the principle of subsidiarity.

However strong the temptation to spend money directly to implement a board decision, building a consensus of contributors is the more powerful way – albeit slower to start, and Openstreetmap itself is proof of that.

A12 Willy Franck SOB - How many paid staff should the OSMF have and why?

It is difficult to answer this question, it all depends on the plan of action and the actions deemed strategic for the maintenance of the OSM infrastructure, which in my opinion is the central raison d'être of the foundation. The other needs will depend on the vision that can be validated at the General Assembly.

A12 Roland Olbricht - How many paid staff should the OSMF have and why?

A responsible employment requires that the OSMF commits to large recurring expenses. Raising the income of an organization usually degrades its reputation; the last of many examples being the Wikimeida Foundation.

A second vector of reputation damage is when the OSMF picks one of multiple competing projects. Value created through volunteers on software development for OSM is estimated to be in the range of many millions of dollars, thus any move by the OSMF that discourages software development elsewhere can easily make an order more damage than the OSMF could ever spend.

Hence, the real question in every single case should be: Is the task really so important for OSM that it is worth the degraded reputation for the OSMF? One charming way out of this is to assk the Community!, in particular before the person to be employed is known: There is no better authority to discuss and confirm or dismiss that the position is proportionate than the OSMF's members.

A12 Michal Migurski - How many paid staff should the OSMF have and why?

I support the current board’s decision to hire paid administrative and operational staff members. It’s not possible to provide a specific number in response to this question while we’re just getting started with paying staff, but based what we observe from experiments with full-time staff in local chapters like OSM US we may decide that additional staff will be necessary.

A12 Eugene Alvin Villar - How many paid staff should the OSMF have and why?

Given the current state and possible growth of the OSM project, I don't think the OSMF would need more than 5 paid staff members within the next 5 years. Most of the paid staff would probably be technical/administrative roles such as the current admin assistant and the SRE position. We should have the minimum paid staff needed to ensure that the Foundation itself is running well, that the technical infrastructure that the Foundation owns operates in tip-top shape, and that core software and tools (such as iD) are adequately supported.

That said, I think it's a good idea that the Foundation is spending funds to support community-led innovation and projects, whether that be through microgrants or funding one-off software development work.

A12 Logan McGovern - How many paid staff should the OSMF have and why?

I believe it is critical that the OSMF is required to pay the number of people needed to effectively maintain servers and critical physical infrastructure as well as expand the infrastructure as needed.

Your views on the use and control of AI (Artificial Intelligence) edit systems?

Do you have any familiarity with OSM AI systems? (e.g. Facebook AI-Assisted Road Tracing, RapiD)
Do you support the development of it?
If the use of AI systems causes damages on existing OSM geographical data (e.g. in Philippines) do you see any needed activity from OSMF side? If yes, which solution the OSMF should provide to control this and organised editing?
How is your general opinion about automated edits?

A13 Tobias Knerr - Your views on the use and control of AI (Artificial Intelligence) edit systems?

I believe AI technology is best used as an additional data source or tool set that is made available to human mappers to help them improve their productivity. It can be valuable in that role, and I find it encouraging that the popular systems seem to be trending in this direction.

All imports and large-scale editing efforts, including automated and organized edits, can cause damage, and adding AI to the mix does not fundamentally change this. If they are done poorly, they can harm the community and drive people away from the project, which far outweighs the benefits of broader data coverage. Pitfalls to avoid include low data quality, non-standard tagging, and poor communications with local volunteer mappers. For individual volunteers, it is easy to feel helpless and frustrated when faced with a group making unwelcome changes. Because of this power imbalance and the other inherent dangers, the OSMF has a set of rules to govern such activities, and a body (the Data Working Group, DWG) to enforce them. I believe the DWG is doing a good job, but if a situation cannot be resolved, the OSMF board is available for appeals as well.

One additional risk with AI is becoming dependent on any particular provider of AI technology. The best antidote is diversification, much like we now have access to a large number of imagery providers. It also helps to choose open source solutions: Our popular editors are open source, which ensures that we cannot lose access to them even if an entity funding the editor's development were to lose interest in OSM. I would prefer for our AI editing tools to be open source as well.

Finally, the question asks about my personal experiences: While I have checked them out to satisfy my curiosity, I do not use AI-based tools in my own mapping at the moment. They don't really help much with the kinds of mapping I enjoy most.

A13 Jean-Marc Liotier - Your views on the use and control of AI (Artificial Intelligence) edit systems?

Automation has driven information systems for more than a century and I see no end to that trend – we better surf that wave rather than let it slam over us. In Openstreetmap’s case, the challenge is for users to bring community quality control level with the power dynamics introduced by actors capable of fast large-scale changes to the Openstreetmap data. That challenge is in the hands of the users – but the Openstreetmap Foundation must provide solid support. The Data Working Group is the correct institutional frame for that – but it may have to tool up and grow to match the new risks. Above all, as with other sorts of imports, the actual method must be conflation – with human intelligence in control so that all contributors remain mutually even when assisted by automation… Openstreetmap will keep enforcing that process, vital to ensuring its quality.

A13 Willy Franck SOB - Your views on the use and control of AI (Artificial Intelligence) edit systems?

Do you have any familiarity with OSM AI systems? (e.g. Facebook AI-Assisted Road Tracing, RapiD)

Yes, I am familiar with it all.

Do you support the development of it?

I am in favor of its development as long as there is human control at the end of the chain before importing it into OSM. On the other hand, I am less favorable to massive imports in an automatic way. In any case, the control of the OSM database must be a permanent action...

If the use of AI systems causes damages on existing OSM geographical data (e.g. in Philippines) do you see any needed activity from OSMF side? If yes, which solution the OSMF should provide to control this and organised editing?

It is necessary to rely on existing coordination tools and train local actors in data validation, and if possible provide a small budget to motivate contributors. This would be appreciated when we know that behind its technologies often hide very large companies with the capacity to finance. Be careful not to replace the contributors with Robots, as this would kill the collaboration and communion behind OSM.

How is your general opinion about automated edits?

I am in favor of its development as long as there is human control at the end of the chain before importing it into OSM. On the other hand, I am less favorable to massive imports in an automatic way. In any case, the control of the OSM database must be a permanent action...

A13 Roland Olbricht - Your views on the use and control of AI (Artificial Intelligence) edit systems?

Do you have any familiarity with OSM AI systems? (e.g. Facebook AI-Assisted Road Tracing, RapiD)

I do not buy the marketing term "Intelligence" at all. I'm familar with the development of AI since the discussion about symbolic and non-symbolic AI back in the 90ties. A tool is only serious if it has a clearly delimited scope, e.g. road tracing (suggesting geometry from satellite images), but not road classification (guessing the value of the highway tag), warns that it is heuristic and calibrated in region X, and does not bother the user with implementation details. If it claims to be "intelligent" but does not tell you with images of which regions it has been confirmed to work, then be wary.

Do you support the development of it?

The most recent systems had a poor ratio of development diligence to marketing budget.

If the use of AI systems causes damages on existing OSM geographical data (e.g. in Philippines) do you see any needed activity from OSMF side? If yes, which solution the OSMF should provide to control this and organised editing?

Please look at the larger picture: We live in a work where many organisations have some form of geodata, from an address list of their branches to multiband satellite images. I have seen hundreds of such datasets, and none of them were free of errors. The organizations can even for themselves only lift the true potential of their geodata if they cross-reference with a universal peer-reviewed geodata database, and this is OSM. This applies even more if they want to give back and publish the data in a useful way. Thus, there is a constant pressure to pour bulk data into OSM.

The long-term solution is to offer two databases:

the peer-reviewed database that today is the sole database
a heap for bulk data such that data from third parties becomes interoperable without tainting the peer-reviewed data

The challenge is to develop software to connect both databases smoothly, i.e. allow for cross-referencing from the heap to the peer-reviewed database, deal with contradictions within the heap, and make it easy to promote data from the heap to the peer-reviewed database when confirmed by mappers.

A short term solution is to clarify roles:

our first line of defence against damage is the peer-review of the mappers.
our second line of defence is the DWG.
the OSMF is a merely legally not factually competent third line of defence

The only case so far where the OSMF as third line of defence has been involved is the Crimea conflict. The course of events were not exactly helpful to build trust, thus I prefer to avoid any other case where the board of the OSMF becomes involved in mapping decisions.

How is your general opinion about automated edits?

Writing software is much easier than understanding large databases, dealing with corner cases, handling internal contradictions, and, most importantly, work out with the databases' stakeholders how to proceed safely.

A similar situation exists with car traffic: pushing throttles and spinning the driving wheel is much easier than understanding physics and the needs of fellow street users. Part of the solution for car traffic have been obligatory licenses for driving. Our nowadays much less bureaucratic approach of just doing some communication might be good enough for the moment, but unless we are quick enough with the heap database, we may sooner or later need to tighten the permissions.

A13 Michal Migurski - Your views on the use and control of AI (Artificial Intelligence) edit systems?

I’m a member of the Spatial Computing team at Facebook that produces RapiD, so I’m intimately familiar with the project and its goals, and I support them.

Damage caused by any editing system may require input or even resolution from the OSMF and its working groups, such as the Data Working Group or some other appropriate WG.

A13 Eugene Alvin Villar - Your views on the use and control of AI (Artificial Intelligence) edit systems?

I am very familiar with the introduction of AI/ML tools in the OSM ecosystem including the building detections done by Microsoft, the road detections done by Facebook, and Facebook's RapiD fork to easily ingest these detections into OSM. I am a supporter of using AI/ML as one of the tools that mappers can use to improve OSM, but only if these systems are used by local mappers having local knowledge. This means that developers of AI/ML systems should not add detections into OSM themselves without consulting or coordinating with the local community (like what apparently happened when Facebook added tons of AI road data in Thailand without the local community's blessing).

This is why the PH local community started the Tabang-AI initiative.(1) In fact, I was the one that announced this initiative to the wider OSM community back in 2019.(2) One of our stipulations with Facebook when we requested them to do these road detections in the country was that any AI-related edits in the Philippines would only be done by local mappers and not by Facebook's map team. The announcement understandably resulted in scepticism and questions from non-PH mappers who are wary of AI/ML editing in general(3) until Mike Collinson vouched that we in the PH local community really know what we are doing.(4) (There were no follow-up questions after Mike replied.)

As for automated edits, I see them as another tool that mappers can use to improve the map, but as long as the automated edits code of conduct(5) is followed and also the import guidelines(6) if imports are involved.

A13 Logan McGovern - Your views on the use and control of AI (Artificial Intelligence) edit systems?

I am familiar with OSM AI systems such as RapiD and have used them in my current position as a GIS technician. I strongly support the development of AI systems that assist the efforts of human editors. I do not favor the development of AI systems that contribute edits independently, without human review. Organized editing teams are accountable for the edits that they make to the map. Severe damage that negatively affects the quality of the map and diminishes its usability can’t be tolerated. A public rebuke by the OSMF board may be warranted.

What is your opinion of the proposal for a software dispute resolution panel?

Background links for context, added at the time of answers' publication:

2020-08 Proposal for software dispute resolution committee
2020-08 Discussion on talk mailing list (register here, all emails here)
2020-08 https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/w/images/8/8a/20200720_digest_responses_iD_proposal.odt Digest of answers provided by Allan Mustard]
2020-08 Board discussion during August public meeting. Decision: "If a WG shows interest, we will look at the situation again and decide the next step."
2020-10 Notes from board discussion during the October 2020 board screen-to-screen meeting. Decision: Allan will start drafting a document with questions to the Data Working Group (DWG) about what their implementation could look like. We're still seeking a proposal, and still holding the decision.

A14 Tobias Knerr - What is your opinion of the proposal for a software dispute resolution panel?

As a board member, I have contributed to the proposal for the software dispute resolution panel, and I support giving this new institution an opportunity to prove itself. Specifically, it does stand a good chance of resolving some of the issues concerning the iD editor, and as explained in a previous question, I believe it makes sense for the OSMF and community to take an interest in iD development in particular.

If the panel proves worthwhile, it should preferably become self-sustaining by handing the responsibility over to one or several working groups. I would like to avoid relying on a group of people hand-picked by the board for this role. The board traditionally refrains from taking on tasks that could be advanced by working groups and the increased centralization this would imply. Our working groups, such as the DWG, bring relevant expertise to the table, and have built up a high level of trust over the years.

A14 Jean-Marc Liotier - What is your opinion of the proposal for a software dispute resolution panel?

There were disputes, the panel is a way to solve them in an organized fashion. I am not competent enough to judge if it is the best way, but a well defined process and an hands-off approach are coherent with what I strive for.

A14 Willy Franck SOB - What is your opinion of the proposal for a software dispute resolution panel?

No answer.

A14 Roland Olbricht - What is your opinion of the proposal for a software dispute resolution panel?

The whole thing makes only sense if both sides, mappers and developers, trust the commitee. But it is at least a thing worth trying.

Independend of this candidature, I volunteer for the panel, building on my long experience both in software development and mapping.

A14 Michal Migurski - What is your opinion of the proposal for a software dispute resolution panel?

I don’t have an opinion on the software dispute resolution panel.

A14 Eugene Alvin Villar - What is your opinion of the proposal for a software dispute resolution panel?

I think that this is a good and amicable solution to the iD tagging problem (see also the earlier related question). I applaud the current Board for proposing this solution and asking the Data Working Group if they are willing to take on this additional role. For the composition of the panel, I agree that the members of the DWG would make excellent panel members given their experience in handling disputes. But if the DWG cannot take this task on, a manner similar to the creation of the Microgrants Committee would also be acceptable.

A14 Logan McGovern - What is your opinion of the proposal for a software dispute resolution panel?

I am in favor of the establishment of a software dispute resolution panel. I think the proposal represents a strong first step towards the establishment of such a panel.

Should we do anything about EU database rights?

The OSMF is incorporated in the UK. The UK completely leaves the European Union on 31 December 2020 and so EU database rights held by UK entities are impacted. Do you think that changes that keep our license clearly enforceable in the EU (e.g. moving the OSMF) are important? Would you give them high priority for your involvement in the OSMF board?

A15 Tobias Knerr - Should we do anything about EU database rights?

Our goal should be a solution that preserves the existing level of protection within the EU if this is practically feasible. It is unlikely that we would be able to move the OSMF itself in the short term (although I would not rule it out indefinitely), but we are currently investigating more plausible approaches such as the creation of an EU subsidiary.

A15 Jean-Marc Liotier - Should we do anything about EU database rights?

As the effect will only concern data added after 31 December 2020, this is not a matter of immediate urgency – we have a few months to make up our minds. I am insufficiently competent to decide on the matter, so I recommend seeking legal advice about the ways to protect the Openstreetmap database in various jurisdictions. As a citizen of the European Union, I am of course biased towards the benefits of our supranational state.

A15 Willy Franck SOB - Should we do anything about EU database rights?

OSM is and must remain a free and participatory community project. So if for this reason we need to relocate the servers so that the community is preserved, then we will need to have the lucidity to do so. But after discussion, and negotiation if as a last resort it's the only option, then we'll have to relocate...

A15 Roland Olbricht - Should we do anything about EU database rights?

Definitely yes:
The attribution requirement is substantial part of the motivation for many mappers. The share alike provision helps to be taken seriously, otherwise the attribution requirement would lose too easliy against politics considerations of large organizations.

It looks like we are falling out of legal protection in the EU if no action is taken. A definite answer is difficult because Brexit negotiations are ongoing. But I honestly do not have a straightforward plan to fix the problem, in particular which part of the OSMF needs to move where.

A15 Michal Migurski - Should we do anything about EU database rights?

This sounds like an important issue for the LWG or an attorney retained by OSMF to resolve. We should prioritize getting it handled by a legal professional.

A15 Eugene Alvin Villar - Should we do anything about EU database rights?

I think the OSMF should reasonably and practicably pursue efforts to ensure that the OSM database continues to enjoy protections under the EU's database rights law. It seems that setting up a subsidiary in the EU for the purposes of acting as the OSM database publisher, rather than moving the OSMF to the EU, is the most practical solution.

That said, and with the caveat that I am not a copyright / intellectual property rights lawyer, I do not think that this needs to be high in the Board's list of priorities. The reason why the community selected the ODbL as its license is because we want the database to enjoy protection worldwide regardless of whether database right exists in a jurisdiction or not. So I do not think that Brexit and the end of the transition period on December 31 is an existential crisis for the continued protection of the database.

A15 Logan McGovern - Should we do anything about EU database rights?

Long-term considerations should take precedence with regards to the Brexit issue. The benefits for relocation seemingly outweigh the cons. It would certainly be exhausting in the short-term, but important intellectual property rights would be maintained with the relocation. It would be best if a decision is made soon.

Manifestos

Tobias Knerr

OpenStreetMap has come a long way from its humble beginnings. Billions of people are using our maps, either directly or as part of another product. Our data powers some of the world's most popular websites and apps, serves the needs of hikers and cyclists, helps optimize logistics, propels video games to the next level of realism, guides cars navigating parking lots on autopilot, offers accessibility for people with disabilities, adorns postcards, wall clocks or clothing, and unlocks countless creative and unexpected possibilities beyond. OSM is everywhere. By producing a truly global dataset, our project offers enormous transformative potential, and a fertile ground for innovation where even small organizations and individuals have unhindered access to the world's best source of map data.

We've clearly done a lot of things right! If we want to see this incredible success story continue, I believe it is essential to preserve the values that have made it possible. To me, this includes our appreciation for local knowledge and the open-ended data model which caters to a diverse set of use cases as well as our spirit of do-ocracy that allows everyone to chip in and empowers people with valuable skills and great ideas to make a difference. And most of all, it has to include our amazing community of contributors who must not be – as is the case with all too many platforms relying on user-generated content – a mere source of free labour, but the group which controls the direction of OSM.

As our project grows further, attracts the attention of a growing number of commercial actors, and has to deal with a changing social and technological landscape, keeping the OSM spirit alive requires us to respond to these new challenges. So even though I'm happy to have been able to implement many of the ideas outlined in my 2018 manifesto, the overall goal of strengthening the influence of volunteers in the OSMF is sure to keep me busy for two more years.

That's not all I want to get done, though, as there are a few corners of the project where it's hard to shake the feeling that forward movement has stalled. Notably, whereas the wider ecosystem is healthy and vibrant, some of our core services have not kept up: The data model hasn't seen any major new features in over a decade. Some of our communication platforms are aging and, at times, insufficiently moderated, which contributes to an unfortunate trend for subcommunities to scatter across various proprietary channels. The openstreetmap.org front page is selling OSM's capabilities short by showcasing only a limited subset of our data, and there are missed opportunities to present our project in a better light. As the entity operating these core services, the OSMF has a responsibility to meet the growing needs of the OpenStreetMap project.

For a more thorough exploration of my ideas for the board, and some of the specific challenges that I expect we will have to deal with as a community, I invite you to also check out my answers to the official questions! This manifesto isn't meant to duplicate everything I've written elsewhere, but as a spotlight on some of my core priorities.

Jean-Marc Liotier

When it comes to policy decisions, deep understanding and shared values are essential. In the form of my 2.8 million map changes in 1070 mapping days since 2009, my writing, my teaching and coaching, all unpaid, my skin in the game is proof I bear the values of Openstreetmap.

An academic background in business administration and twenty years of professional experience in the management of information systems projects for network operators will let me interact on firm footing with all possible stakeholders around the Openstreetmap Foundation.

By its nature, Openstreetmap is bound to the free software movement and to its politics. In this context, my foremost duty as a board member will be to ensure that Openstreetmap survives and thrives under a copyleft license – such as the current license. User of free software for the last 25 years, constant in my advocacy and free from conflicts of interest as my income does not depend on Openstreetmap, I bring a promise of political stability that I believe essential to the continuing success of Openstreetmap. Everything else is accessory to that and can be handled by the working groups: the board should merely be the ultimate keeper of the oath.

The success of Openstreetmap will draw on diversity in many dimensions: individual and corporate, professional and amateur, for-profit and non-profit, all genders, origins and creeds. For that to occur without turning into the clan warfare that our cooperation can easily (and sometimes does) degenerate into and to protect the weak from the strong, the Openstreetmap Foundation must ensure all participant have no doubt about its willingness to enforce its institutional framework in accordance to core values that won’t be diluted for anyone’s convenience. I’ll represent those who support that position and I promise transparency.

Warning large donors that the Openstreetmap that donations tied to unacceptable conditions will be refused is only credible if those donations are not Openstreetmap’s lifeline. So that Openstreetmap is never tempted to let itself drift away from its values by generous offers in times of need, I will advocate focusing the Openstreetmap Foundation’s budget on its core infrastructure and core missions: sustainability is non-negotiable and frugality is the mean to that end – though that doesn’t exclude earmarked donations for non-core projects that might proceed more efficiently through the Foundation. So that Openstreetmap does not become vitally dependent on external staff on a commercial basis, the foundation’s working groups must retain skilled volunteers in those hands operational control must remain. That requires extra care in giving them the proper consideration and agency that makes them uniquely valuable contributors and not mere free labor. It is one more reason for the board to defer to the working groups, under the principle of subsidiarity.

However strong the temptation to spend money directly to implement a board decision, building a consensus of contributors is often the more powerful way – albeit slower to start, and Openstreetmap itself is proof of that.

Willy Franck SOB

In the beginning was OpenStreetMap …

Adopting a new approach for an "efficient" mapping of my country; this is the challenge I took on when I was still a student in France! Very early on I had a clear vision: to progress, the mapping of African countries such as Cameroon would benefit from a new approach that would not be limited to the technical and economic perimeters alone. It then seems desirable to propose an alternative to "humanitarian" type cooperation schemes whose operationality is all too rarely part of a sustainable vision of development.

From the outset, I am convinced that the technological disruption introduced by the OpenStreetMap community project is one of the keys to a profound reform of the way geographic data is produced on a large scale; so it is a question of conceiving OSM as a "platform" capable of federating all local cartographic production initiatives. Even better, this project allows for the "recycling" of previous cartographic productions.

After graduating in August 2013, I'm going back to Cameroon and the "bet" is put to the test! Opening my geomatics design office in Yaoundé (capital of Cameroon) is not an end in itself. On the contrary, it is first of all a question of "making" an ecosystem where technology, transfer of skills and economic model would form three "dimensions" guaranteeing a qualitative knowledge of the territory. Also in 2013, I founded the OpenStreetMap-Cameroon association, whose main objective is to train students from all horizons in the practice of OSM while introducing its members to the diversity of geographic sciences. The success is immediate! Young and old alike are enthusiastic about the idea of participating in their own way in the mapping of the country while benefiting from free training in a few fundamental concepts of geomatics.

OPENSTREETMAP : from local impact to global added value !

To reinforce this dynamic by introducing international solidarity to complement geomatics, the association Topo Sans Frontières of my former school was mobilized in 2012 for missions to supervise practical field work in partnership with Cameroonian students. The goal is to carry out OSM mapping operations within municipalities in order to allow them to plan their resources more rationally.

Today I am absolutely convinced that OpenStreetMap will be at the heart of the transformation and innovation of our territories.

Please visit my page with a selected piece of achievements based on OpenStreetMap !

Français

Adopter une nouvelle approche pour une cartographie « efficace » de mon pays ; tel est le pari que je m’étais lancé alors même que j’étais encore étudiant en France ! très tôt j’ai une vision claire : pour progresser, la cartographie de pays africains tels que le Cameroun bénéficierait d’une nouvelle approche qui ne se limiterait pas aux seuls périmètres technique et économique. Il apparait alors souhaitable de proposer une alternative aux schémas de coopération de type « humanitaires » dont l’opérationnalité ne s’inscrit que trop rarement dans une vision pérenne de développement.

Dès le départ je suis convaincus que la disruption technologique introduite par le projet communautaire OpenStreetMap forme une des clés d’une réforme profonde du mode de production des données géographiques à grand échelle ; aussi s’agit-il de concevoir OSM comme une « plateforme » capable de fédérer toutes les initiatives locales de production cartographique. Mieux encore ce projet autorise le « recyclage » de productions cartographiques antérieures.

Mon diplôme obtenu en août 2013, je regagne le Cameroun et le « pari » est mis à l’épreuve !
Ouvrir mon bureau d’études géomatique à Yaoundé (capital du Cameroun) n’est pas une fin soi. Au contraire, il s’agit tout d’abord de « fabriquer » un écosystème où technologie, transfert de compétence et modèle économique formeraient trois « dimensions » garantes d’une connaissance qualitative du territoire. Toujours en 2013, je fonde l’association OpenStreetMap-Cameroun dont l’objet principal est prioritairement de former des étudiants de tout horizon à la pratique d’OSM tout en initiant ses membres à la diversité des sciences géographique. Le succès est immédiat ! Jeunes et moins jeunes s’enthousiasment à l’idée de participer à leur façon à la cartographie du pays tout en bénéficiant d’une formation gratuite à quelques concepts fondamentaux de géomatique.

Pour conforter cette dynamique par l’introduction de la solidarité internationale en complément de la géomatique, l’association Topo Sans Frontières de mon ancienne école a été mobilisée dès 2012 pour des missions d’encadrement de travaux pratiques de terrain en partenariat avec les étudiants camerounais. Le but étant de réaliser des opérations de cartographie OSM au sein des municipalités afin de leur permettre une planification plus rationnelle des ressources.

OPENSTREETMAP : de l'impact local à la valeur ajoutée globale !

Aujourd’hui je suis absolument convaincu qu’OpenStreetMap sera au cœur de la transformation et de l’innovation de nos territoires et apportera de la valeur ajoutée au-delà de nos pays.

Je vous prie de consulter ma page avec un morceau choisi de réalisations basées sur OpenStreetMap !

Roland Olbricht

About Me

I'm Roland Olbricht (drolbr). In OpenStreetMap, I'm best known for the Overpass API. I have developed it and maintain the public servers that are available now since more than eight years.

My largest mapping project so far has been to map and complete the about 1500 bus stops in my home city Wuppertal. For that purpose I have written (many years ago) the public_transport plugin for JOSM. Now my mapping interests are in particular on pedestrian routing, in particular for non-standard people like wheelchair users. Part of the challenge there is to figure out what is actually relevant to map, thus communication on top of surveying.

I'm Dr. rer. nat. since 2008 for my works in Pure Mathematics. Since October 2014 I'm a software developer at Mentz in Münster (Westfalen), Germany. My business account is drolbr_mdv.

My day job is developing software for public transport ticketing:
It is quite common in Germany that dozens of operators cooperate to offer a uniform combined tariff to the passengers. Thus, dealing with multiple stakeholders with often conflicting interests is part of my day job. And even more: helping out customers whose tariff data turns out to be so full of faults that it needs to be sanitized or completely rewritten, although the customer is sure its data is perfect. This is always a communication challenge.

Beside living in Wuppertal, Münster, Frankfurt and Bonn in Germany, I have also spent four month in Grenoble in France. So I'll answer mails in German, French, and English.

About OSM

More important than my personal background is my understanding of OSM: There are many sources of free data, and geo data in particular.

The heart of OSM is the mapper community. The data structures in OSM are designed to facilitate peer review, i.e. the mapped data is not so much the physical world but the consent how to interpret it. The On-the-Ground-Principle ensures that it is as close to the physical world as useful.

It also means that we offer a virtual venue to communicate about general purpose geodata, and to help out people who want to get done something new or specific. It also means that it is a place where a developer can make a real difference by helpful software.

In addition, OSM offers fine grained general purpose geo data in a worldwide uniform format, and means to stay always up to date. Thus, we are attracting data consumers as long as we ensure that the mapper community maintains the map.

Mappers get their positive feedback from applications where they can see that their contribution makes a difference. This is a task often overlooked by data consumers:

Not all data consumers have the attribution as clear as we mappers require by the license.
Very few data consumers tell explicitly which tag structures they process and which not. We see this even within the project by disputes over the map style rules for the default map.
We are missing out many mappers, in particular from minorities, because there is no respective service that shows the data that really matters to the potental mappers.

Why Do I Candidate for the Board?

There are two competing paradigms about what the board should be:

The expert paradigm: The assumption is that the voters should elect the super-experts of OSM, and that those do not have to take too serious working groups because the board members were anyway greater experts. It were ok to have a hierarchy of informedness.

The trust paradigm: Voters should ensure that there are members on the board whom they trust that they represent their interests. Expert knowledge is more likely to indicate a conflict of interest than being a requirement.

I subscribe to the trust paradigm:

Keep the trust: The board's communication is only open enough if the community has no doubts left.
The experts are at working groups: The board will not override the (recent and concious) decisions of active working groups. Beside working groups, reaching out for experts for ad hoc topics on the OSMF communication channels makes sense as well.
Sustainable funding: Assure that OSM will remain here and stay independent for many years ahead.

I'm confident that I can speak up for developers in the OSM ecosystem (currently assured by Paul Norman), and I will do my best to speak up for mappers, but I'm aware that interests are diverse enough that conciliation like in the iD case may also be required. I'm happy to help data consumers to understand mapper's needs and OSM intrinsics.

I do on purpose refrain from stating strategic goals.
The active board of this year has started quite a number of initiatives, and external shocks like the Brexit make the to-do-list even longer. It is an act of good teamwork to let existing ideas flourish and getting things done within the trust paradigm instead of throwing in further ideas and completing none.

Michal Migurski

I’ve made OpenStreetMap a major part of my life and work since 2005. It’s not just an audacious, community-built, complete, freely-licensed, street-scale map of the world. OSM is also a big tent that collects the skills and support of a huge range of individual and organizational contributors.

In 2021, OSM’s community has two opportunities to grow stronger together: we should make the OSM organization support a wider diversity of participants and we must succeed at starting to manage our technical operations professionally.

I’m a good candidate to help with both of these existing 2020 OSMF board goals. As a product and engineering leader in several organizations, I can help the Foundation succeed at finding and keeping great engineering talent. With my history on the community and business sides of OSM, I am experienced in making open data attractive to new community members and soliciting support from large organizations.

ABOUT ME
OSM for me has always been a story of global impact through work. At Stamen Design I led our participation in open mapping with a mix of early San Francisco mapping parties, paid clients, and experimental projects. Some, like Field Papers (presented as “Walking Papers” at SOTM 2009 in Amsterdam), helped OSM become a force in humanitarian mapping and have since matured into useful infrastructure. I’ve participated in OSM US since its first conference in Atlanta in 2010 and served on the US Foundation board in 2011 and 2012. I have recently grown so excited by the large-scale use and expansion of OSM that I joined the Facebook mapping team last year to contribute to our OSM efforts. I’ve been excited to see the emergence of “occupational” mappers: community participants who contribute to the project as part of large-scale organized activities in corporate, non-profit, or educational programs. Researcher Jennings Anderson highlighted the enormous impact these mappers are having on the map in North America (https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Jennings%20Anderson/diary/394621) as an example of how behaviors around the map are transitioning into critical infrastructure.

OSM TODAY
In my run for the OSMF board last year, I named three top priorities for the Foundation (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Foundation/AGM19/Election_to_Board/Answers_and_manifestos#Michal_Migurski). I was pleased to come within just a single vote of winning a seat, showing community support for my plans. Every one of my top items remains important, and each has changed since last year’s election of an energetic, active OSMF board. The boardrecently decided to fund full-time and contract technical positions for site reliability engineering and development of the iD editor. The board chair connected with community members around the world, many of whom reported that it was their first-ever time hearing from a Foundation representative (https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/apm-wa/diary/392767). Large organizations remain optimistic about OSM and have even supported the org financially outside traditional conference funding avenues and hardware funding drives. Some early progress has been made on a new Diversity and Inclusion Special Committee (DISC). We’re starting to see regular OSMF board candidacies from growth areas for the map like Africa and Asia, and I encourage you to also rank candidates Willy Franck SOB from Cameroon and Eugene Alvin Villar from the Philippines highly on your ballot. These changes are surfacing tension in the community as well. We need to be smart about how we identify and prevent threats to OSM, so we don’t unintentionally make the project unwelcoming to new participants.

PRIORITIES FOR OSMF BOARD
I will focus on three goals during my term.

Fix our critical bus factor problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor). Thanks to a recent board vote, OSM technical operations will soon be overseen by a full-time, paid member of staff in a Senior Site Reliability Engineer (SSRE) position. This is a large improvement over last year’s shrinking number of longstanding volunteers and lack of a plan for resiliency or for creating new technical services that the community wants. When hired, the new SSRE will need a cooperative board to effectively do their work of raising OSM’s technical capacity and delegating needed help to community volunteers. My experience in supporting technology teams at commercial and non-profit organizations will allow the board to protect and encourage the SSRE’s goals.
Attract diverse new volunteers and participants through outreach and policy changes. Since last year, the OSMF has created DISC but it’s been inactive and in need of board help (https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/mikelmaron/diary/394595 ). I intend to support board member Mikel Maron’s initiative to connect with worldwide users and revitalize the DISC. Board chair Allan Mustard’s 2020 outreach effort is a model for this activity, and there should be multiple board members working together to expand the Foundation’s connections beyond existing channels. The OSMF membership fee waiver for active mappers is also a successful pattern that shows we can attract participation by eliminating barriers. In 2021, we should commit to delivering a Code of Conduct based on the work of DISC. We know from other open source communities such as PyCon and OSMUS that today’s potentially diverse participants often look for a CoC before deciding to pursue participation, and OSM is badly behind the times in this regard.
Build a bridge between local mappers, humanitarian mappers and corporate mappers involved in OSM. Every part of the OSM community helps in different ways, from organizing conferences to writing code or leading community projects. The success of the map has made it interesting for uses alongside hobby surveying, and the recent influx of occupational mappers from companies and non-profits will only grow over time.OSM has missed opportunities to benefit from volunteers through events like Pokémon Go in 2016 and Microsoft Flight Simulator this past year. Large partners can help if shown a productive path, and OSMF should have plans and activities in place to accommodate and guide these new participants toward useful input, rather than defensively circling the wagons.

OpenStreetMap is one of just a handful of worldwide, street-scale maps, and the only one with free and open usage built into its core. Everyone who participates in OSM, whatever their reason, shares a common interest in a high-quality, up-to-date map. By focusing on engineering excellence and expanding reach, OSMF can be stronger in the future with me on the board.

Eugene Alvin Villar

Note: I tried to be comprehensive in my answers to the official set of questions. Therefore I would like to keep my manifesto short and to the point.

First, the Foundation membership should be more diverse and inclusive, and that the organization be more resilient to takeover and external control. I think a really easy way to partly achieve this is to make it easier to join the Foundation, be more welcoming, and find practical ways to make it so that the members are invested in helping OSM succeed. The current Board and membership have done a lot in this regard by voting for and implementing the Active Contributor Membership scheme and imposing stricter requirements for candidates and voters, and pushing for the regular membership option in the upcoming membership resolution vote. We should do more. Mappers from the Global South and women are generally underrepresented in the Foundation and we should promote joining the Foundation more.

Second, I would like for the Foundation to be more active in supporting local communities (and this is why I joined the LCCWG). To that end, there are quite a number of initiatives and ideas that the LCCWG members have conceived and some of these include updating the OSM website to add features that help local communities. I believe the Board is best placed to provide resources to make these happen.

Finally, I would like for the Board to further improve internal processes by (1) creating a guideline document that describes the relationship between the Board and the working groups, (2) improving the transparency of the Board's work a bit more (for instance, it seems that circular resolutions are only disclosed to the members when the next Board meeting agenda is published), and (3) providing Local Chapters more say or influence in Foundation matters that is more than just being on the Advisory Board.

Logan McGovern

Hello everyone, I’m Logan McGovern. I’m from the U.S. and I live in western Colorado. I’m a member of an organized editing team employed by Kaart. I’ve contributed a substantial number of edits to the road system in Mexico. I am extremely grateful for my job. There is always something new to discover, and the thrill of contributing to OpenStreetMap, adding to the cumulative effort of millions of people before me never ceases. I also volunteer for the Humanitarian Open Street Map Team on my own time. Through my various mapping activities, I have had the privilege of meeting many incredible people in the larger OSM community. We all recognize this project is special and unique in its potential. I humbly ask to be granted the privilege of advancing OpenStreetMap as a board member.

As a Board member my priorities are:

Support the induction of many more local chapters across the globe. I recognize that OSM is largely sustained by volunteer editors. They are the lifeblood of the project. local chapters play an important role in reducing attrition of volunteer editors. Recent successes with regards to local chapters have been admirable. Five continents are now represented in the foundation. I will do everything I can to see that this success continues. Congratulations to Congo-Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of Congo) for becoming OSM’s newest local chapter! Emphasis should be given to expanding the number of local chapters outside Europe.
The possibility of hostile takeover of the OSMF board is an issue that has consumed much energy and attention in the past couple years. I want to help put this issue to rest. It is a priority of mine to support practical efforts to harden the OSMF against hostile takeover. For example, I am in favor of implementing some form of contribution requirement (mapping, software development, etc.) in order to be eligible to run as a candidate for the board.
Ensure that the systems reliability engineer is provided with the resources necessary to maintain and expand critical infrastructure so that it can meet global demand.
Encourage diversity through vocal public commendation by the board of people who are specifically members of underrepresented groups. Those being commended will have distinguished themselves through their contributions to OpenStreetMap or furthered the project in some fashion. I support special emphasis on recognizing the achievements of women in the OpenStreetMap community.
Support efforts to bridge the communication gap between corporations and volunteer editors. OpenStreetMap benefits immensely from the participation of both groups. Volunteer editors contribute richly nuanced geographic data to OpenStreetMap. Organized editing teams can contribute quality data with a thoroughness that is difficult to replicate.

osmfoundation.org AGM details and agenda

Foundation/AGM20/Election to Board/Answers and manifestos

Contents

Notes

Order

Receipt of answers and manifestos

Languages

Editing this page

Some abbreviations

Answers and manifesto per candidate

Answers per question

Your OSM activities

Why you want to be a board member?

Your time

Do you have any previous relevant experience?

Transparency: Conflicts of interest

YOUR VIEW

What to do with the face to face meeting in Corona times?

What's the use of the OSMF ?

What will you do to build a worldwide community of mappers?

What will you do to encourage more women leaders in OSM working groups and governance?

Should OSMF accept funding/donations by companies or organisations which do not want to be disclosed to the public?

Editing conflicts

How many paid staff should the OSMF have and why?

Your views on the use and control of AI (Artificial Intelligence) edit systems?

What is your opinion of the proposal for a software dispute resolution panel?

Should we do anything about EU database rights?

Manifestos

Tobias Knerr

Jean-Marc Liotier

Willy Franck SOB

Français

Roland Olbricht

Michal Migurski

Eugene Alvin Villar

Logan McGovern

Navigation menu

Foundation/AGM20/Election to Board/Answers and manifestos

Notes

Order

Receipt of answers and manifestos

Languages

Editing this page

Some abbreviations

Answers and manifesto per candidate

Answers per question

Your OSM activities

Why you want to be a board member?

Your time

Do you have any previous relevant experience?

Transparency: Conflicts of interest

YOUR VIEW

What to do with the face to face meeting in Corona times?

What's the use of the OSMF ?

What will you do to build a worldwide community of mappers?

What will you do to encourage more women leaders in OSM working groups and governance?

Should OSMF accept funding/donations by companies or organisations which do not want to be disclosed to the public?

Editing conflicts

How many paid staff should the OSMF have and why?

Your views on the use and control of AI (Artificial Intelligence) edit systems?

What is your opinion of the proposal for a software dispute resolution panel?

Should we do anything about EU database rights?

Manifestos

Tobias Knerr

Jean-Marc Liotier

Willy Franck SOB

Français

Roland Olbricht

Michal Migurski

Eugene Alvin Villar

Logan McGovern

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