Foundation/AGM21/Election to Board/Answers and manifestos/Q1 Your OSM activities

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Your OSM activities

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?


Guillaume Rischard - Q1 Your OSM activities

What brought you to OSM and why are you still part of it now? What is your OSM user name?

I’m Guillaume Rischard, from Luxembourg, living in New York since this summer. On OSM I map as Stereo, which is easier to pronounce. My dad made maps; I loved to do that even as a child.

I’ve been on the OSM Foundation’s board and foundation’s treasurer for the last two years.

When I discovered OpenStreetMap in 2008, there were only a few main roads displayed around me. I didn’t take it seriously. In 2011, I ran into it again, and saw that the map had become a lot more detailed. I spotted a missing name, and when I saw it displayed on the map when I refreshed right after saving it, I was hooked. When I upload a changeset, I still like to open that place in my browser while it still hasn’t rendered, open the same url in a new tab a few seconds later, then switch between the tabs. Even a decade later, it doesn’t get old.

The way we map has changed so much that it rarely gets boring. But what I love the most about OSM now is the smart and generous community. I enjoy meeting mappers wherever life takes me.

What mapping contributions have you made in the last year?

In the last year, I’ve created 458 changesets over 127 days. Covid and moving across the ocean has made everything weird, and mapping is something I’ve sometimes retreated to the way some people meditate, garden or get homesick.

A lot of my efforts this year were focused on addresses. Neither OSM nor the official address database in Luxembourg are perfect, and I’ve been trying to manually conflate every difference. Sometimes it’s as easy as fixing a typo, sometimes you have to go there, dig for records, make corrections on either or both sides. There are now about 400 addresses on OSM that are more correct than in the official database, and about as many that haven’t been checked yet. My official address database polishing tool applies about 1000 corrections to the official data, from corrections to enhancements to deleted addresses.

My lockdown project was Mapper’s Delight, a rendering of open lidar point cloud data of Luxembourg. It’s been extremely useful throughout the year to map forest paths and align all kinds of imagery. Through the community’s efforts in using my lidar rendering, I’m pretty sure that OSM is, by far, the best map of forest paths in Luxembourg. Even the national archaeology centre, which was sceptical at first, likes to use my map. See if you can spot the hidden forts in the park around Luxembourg City?

I have also mapped every Luxembourg diplomatic mission in the world

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

Yes! I’m a member of the Membership Working Group, where I co-wrote the report on the “suspicious signups” - 100 employees of one company signed up hoping to subvert the 2018 board elections.

I am also a member of the Data Working Group, although I have been less active since my election to the board.

I’m the board’s liaison to the Operations Working Group, where we’ve resumed organising monthly meetings. With this new energy, we’ve recently spent more than 100k€ on setting up our new data centre in Dublin. Through negotiations with suppliers, I saved the OSMF tens of thousands of Euros.

Finally, I’m also the board liaison to the Licensing Working Group, where my recent big project was the attribution guidelines. Because of my work, the guidelines clarify how and where attribution should be shown, and how some of the existing styles of hidden attribution are not acceptable to us. More on that in the attribution question below.

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?

If you’re near NYC, come to our OSM day in Brooklyn on 21 November! I’ll add a link later.

The pandemic has been difficult for this, and I deeply miss meeting other mappers. I used to be a regular fixture at events wherever I went.

Community mapping in Kosovo quickly made OSM the best map there. State of the Map South East Europe in late 2019 was the last 'big' event I was able to attend. When I was at the OSM Hack Weekend in Karlsruhe in early 2020, Covid was still something very distant on the radar. My keynote to Fossgis in March had to be delivered over video. I’ve had a few small social meetings with mappers in Belgium or Luxembourg since.

I hope that we will soon be able to resume our in-person OSM conferences. The SotM working group has done fantastic efforts, but it’s just not the same online.

Finally, I hang out on several OSM IRC and Telegram channels.

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.

The most significant thing I’ve written is probably the MWG report on the 100 suspicious signups. My co-author Steve Friedl and I were honoured to receive the OpenStreetMap award for influential writing for it at the State of the Map conference in Heidelberg.

A lot of things have been written about that report. One of the most interesting reaction was Steven Feldman’s “Entryism in Open Communities”. My favourite remains the short paragraph about the incident on the GlobalLogic Wikipedia page, which they tried to remove before that was reverted. Hah!

I’ve given interviews about OpenStreetMap or been cited in The Guardian, Woxx (in German) and NextInpact (in French)

Most of what I type about OSM flows into the different chat rooms.

Do you contribute as a software developer?

Yes! I co-maintain the editor layer index, which is used by iD. I’m probably the worst maintainer, since I’d like to kill the project and merge it with the JOSM imagery index.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time working on modernising the macOS port of JOSM, which no longer produces scary warnings about unsigned code when opened, and comes with a modern version of Java built-in. Running JOSM on macOS is a lot easier, and also looks a lot better. The next step will be to create a port for M1 processors.

I also submit many github issues and pull requests to various OSM-related projects.

Have you attended board meetings as a guest?

In the last two years, only as a board member, never as a guest :).

Michal Migurski - Q1 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 non-profits relevant to OSM. 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, we support the popular RapiD AI-assisted editing tool with partners like Esri, and we publish our interpretation of OSM back to the community as the Daylight Map Distribution. Our OpenStreetMap efforts support all of Facebook’s map display needs.

Most recently, I have been a participant in biweekly OSM operations group activities where I’ve focused on connecting with outside donations of distribution network capacity. I’ve also contributed extensively to the LCCWG’s 2021 project to update OSM’s Etiquette Guidelines and introduce community management to OSMF-supported mailing lists.

Amanda McCann - Q1 Your OSM activities

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

I've always liked maps. And free software / liberatory computer systems. Hence OSM was a natural fit. I find it a fun pastime. I find it a powerful tool for humanity take control our our maps. I find it a great excuse to get outside and explore my local area. I find it a great way actually look around when I'm outside to try to map things. I find it a great way to make new friends

What is your OSM user name?

᚛ᚐᚋᚐᚅᚇᚐ᚜ 🏳️‍🌈
https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/%E1%9A%9B%E1%9A%90%E1%9A%8B%E1%9A%90%E1%9A%85%E1%9A%87%E1%9A%90%E1%9A%9C%20%F0%9F%8F%B3%EF%B8%8F%E2%80%8D%F0%9F%8C%88

For the record, I came out as transgender & transitioned in mid-2021 my diary entry. I previously used another name (beginning with “R”).

What mapping contributions have you made in the last year?

Lots. I try to map every day. I'm an active StreetComplete user, so I use that whenever I can. I also use JOSM to take part in long lasting mapping projects, like OSM Ireland's “map all the buildings in Ireland” project, and the “River moderization project”.

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

Communication Working Group for several years. I run the OSM Promotional Material Programme. I have posted out thousands of OSM stickers (in a dozen different designs) to practically every continent.

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

I'm a member of several local chapters (IE, DE, I think UK & US too). I regularly attend the local Karlsruhe monthly meet up, and State of the Map conference.

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

I've helped run the Geofabrik OSM Hackweekend. I've sometimes given video talks (e.g. for OSM Ireland)

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.

I've got a mastodon/fediverse account with my OpenStreetMap stuff: https://en.osm.town/@amapanda Things there are synced to Twitter https://twitter.com/lalonde/ I post on the mailing lists occasionally. I write a monthly diary of what I did in OSM, which includes a lot of OSMF Board stuff. I have written 11,000 words on this so far.

Do you contribute as a software developer?

A little bit. Nothing big, just little bits here and there. You can see my Github page https://github.com/amandasaurus (a small amount are mirrored to https://git.sr.ht/~ebel/ )

Have you attended board meetings as a guest?

A quick count shows I've attended 22 of the 23 board meetings that happened between now & when I was first elected to the board. My attendance for the mid month chats must be similar. I had attended a few meetings before my election as a guest.

Mikel Maron - Q1 Your OSM activities

I came to OpenStreetMap in 2005, immensely excited by the frankly insane vision that we could all map the world together. OSM sat at the intersection my belief in the best of what collaboration on the internet could be, with opportunity for direct experience and impact on the world around us. Walking through a town (Brighton UK in my case) and figuring out how to represent all of it digitally was eye opening. The number of applications was staggering -- particularly in disaster response where I was trying to focus. And there was solid contribution to make right away -- in the map data, the technology stack, the social organizing. I embraced it all.

OSM still has me 16 years later for two reasons. First, the incredible growth and success of OpenStreetMap has meant endless opportunities to learn new things and contribute and apply myself in new ways. Second is the immediate connection to people doing amazing work all over the globe.

My OSM user name is mikelmaron. My mapping has slowed to a couple times per month over the past couple years, with work and family and my OSMF duties taking a lot of time. Over my whole mapping life, I've focused the most on mapping the entirety of Brighton, UK, and supporting the comprehensive mapping of the Kibera slum in Nairobi, Kenya through Map Kibera. As well, I make regular though lighter contributions in my adopted home town of Washinton DC. I have been involved with the OSM US local chapter and local MappingDC group, but certainly less so with the pandemic. I have also contributed as a software developer over the years, in the early days helping keeping the early tile rendering stack running, and implementing the first versions of the slippy map, and later doing work on analytics and quality tools.

Events wise I've run lots of OSM events -- from workshops that kicked off mapping Brighton UK, to mapping parties at the UN which helped build the community that became Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team. One of my favorite events to organize was the White House Mapathon -- we got a boisterous group together at the White House in 2015 to contribute to OSM. Writing wise, I used to write a ton on my blog (http://brainoff.com/weblog/) and my diary (https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/mikelmaron/diary), and on the HOT, Map Kibera and Mapbox blog. The writing I'm most proud is actually pretty dry: for a short time contributing to OpenStreetMap was an official part of US government policy (https://www.opengovpartnership.org/stories/transforming-open-government-through-open-mapping/). I've also spoken and been interviewed about OSM related work frequently, including for broadcast on the Geospatial Revolution (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChWj4yBmE0E) and the Crowd and Cloud (http://crowdandcloud.org/watch-the-episodes/episode-one).

Within the OSM Foundation, I have served as a Board Member since 2015, and prior to that from 2007-2012. During that time I've been involved with many working groups. I started the Data Working Group, have helped with the State of the Map for many years, particularly the scholarship program, and more recently I've contributed to the Communications Working Group.

Roland Olbricht - Q1 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 useful tools. This in turn made mappers the life easier: for many details there is now effective 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 has been 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'm currently chairing the newly found Engineering Working Group.

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 frequent 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:

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.

Bryan Housel - Q1 Your OSM activities

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

Although my account is older, I really started participating actively in OSM around 2013.

I’ve been a trail runner for years. I go out into the woods to run, then later view my activities on the map on Garmin’s website. On a site like that, you have the choice of which basemap to display, for example Google, Here, or OSM. The OSM basemap always has the best trail coverage out of all of them, and knowing that I could edit it myself is what really brought me into the project. I also develop software as my day job and started contributing to iD around 2013 shortly after it launched.

I am still here because I care about OSM a lot! One of the things I really like about OSM is that a lot of people participate because mapping is related to their other interests, whether that’s running/cycling, volunteering, community organizing, games such as Pokemon Go and PGA Tour 2k21, the Teslarati auto club, etc. They say “spatial is special” and it’s true - it underpins almost everything else about how we live our lives.

Q: What is your OSM user name?

I have a few accounts: My main account that I use for normal editing and communication is ‘bhousel’:
https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/bhousel

I have another account ‘bhousel_bot’ that I very rarely use for bulk edits and reverts.
https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/bhousel_bot

I also have another spare account ‘bhousel_test’ that I don’t really use except for testing weird software things involving multiple accounts.
https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/bhousel_test

Q: What mapping contributions have you made in the last year?

Most mapping that I do these days is related to testing the software that I work on. If you see me editing, it’s probably because a new software release is coming out soon, or I’m trying to reproduce a bug, or I’m trying to fix some bad data.

Pascal Neis’s site is a great way to see what I’ve been doing:
https://hdyc.neis-one.org/?bhousel
https://hdyc.neis-one.org/?bhousel_bot

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

In the past I participated in the Engineering Working Group (EWG) to support our work with the Google Summer of Code program. I’m excited to see the EWG start up again!

I sometimes listen in anonymously to other working group meetings when they are publicly available.

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

I participate in the OSM-US community, and I am active on OSM-US Slack and on OSM World Discord.

I’ve attended in-person meetups in New York City, New Jersey, Philadelphia, and Washington DC., as well as attending many map conferences. We haven’t had much in-person activity due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and I hope to see in-person meetups resume when it’s safe and responsible to do so.

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

Some of my favorite events have been working with people who have no experience with mapping and watching them make their first few edits. This is really the best way to learn about gaps in the mapping process and discover the issues that our new users struggle with (I could talk for hours about this).

I have attended, but not run, TeachOSM and HOT mapping events. I organized hackathons for OSM developers in 2017, 2018, 2019.

Q: 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.

I’ve written about OSM many times and given talks at SOTM, SOTM-US, Geography 2050, and various other venues. My favorite events have involved introducing OSM to new users at a tech meetup or hackerspace (these sorts of events are never recorded).

Here are links to a few public talks and posts I’ve given about iD or OSM:

iD v3 (SOTMUS 2019, Minneapolis)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnML0w0qFCw
Mapping Brands with the Name-Suggestion-Index (SOTMUS 2019, Minneapolis)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEe8Hv12J-c
OpenStreetMap US Hiring Post (GeoHipster 2018)
https://geohipster.com/2018/07/27/openstreetmap-us-were-hiring/
State of iD (SOTM 2018, Milan)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZK-t402g8E
State of iD (SOTMUS 2018, Detroit)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGrKGmXeGkI
State of iD (SOTMUS 2017, Boulder)
https://youtu.be/APSDp6GKy9c?t=820

Q: Do you contribute as a software developer?

Yes! I was the primary maintainer of iD from around 2014-2019:
https://github.com/openstreetmap/iD/graphs/contributors We had an active community of developers during this time and shipped a lot of important improvements to iD. (see the talks above - I always try to give shout outs to the great work done by others)

I still work on iD occasionally, but these days my focus is more on projects that have been spun out of iD into their own projects:

- RapiD, a fork of iD with enhancements for working with external data and ML (machine learning) detected roads and buildings:
https://github.com/facebookincubator/RapiD
https://mapwith.ai

- Name Suggestion Index, a list of commonly mapped features from OSM (brands, operators, transit networks, and more), with their preferred tagging and matched to Wikidata identifiers:
https://github.com/osmlab/name-suggestion-index
https://nsi.guide

- OSM Community Index, a list of all the community resources that people have created around OpenStreetMap
https://github.com/osmlab/osm-community-index
https://openstreetmap.community

Also a few other random tools that solve interesting problems:

Q: Have you attended board meetings as a guest?

Yes, I sometimes listen in anonymously to both board meetings, advisory board meetings, and working group meetings.

I have to admit - some of these meetings have been difficult to listen to, and I feel that the tone of this organization and the way that people treat one another in these meetings needs to improve.


OSM Foundation's board election 2021: official questions

All board candidates' manifestos

OSM Foundation's board election 2021 - OSM Foundation's Annual General Meeting 2021: information and agenda

v · d · e
Annual General Meetings of the OpenStreetMap Foundation
Board Elections
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