Talk:Foundation/Local Chapters/United States/Mission statement

I'm not sure what this statement means "Maintain quality of OpenStreetMap data to ensure community specific standards are met"

I'm changing "Support local groups with mapping activities and events" to "Support local mapping activities"

And lastly "Educate the public on best practices for contributing data to OpenStreetMap" - is this the job of OSM US?

- Serge

I agree with Serge about making the mapping activities clause more vague, but I added "including, but not limited to mapping parties" to the text.

I also changed "copyright and liability issues" to "legal issues"

--DiverCTH 03:41, 15 December 2009 (UTC)

I propose getting rid of "territories, protectorates and possessions". This is implied anyway when saying "United States". Shorter simpler the mission statement, the better. --Kate (talk) 19:22, 16 December 2009 (UTC)

Can we get someone on the talk-legal list to verify this? - I was under the impression that "United States" only applies to the 50 ratified states, and that Puerto Rico, USVI, etc... had separate legal statuses.--DiverCTH 21:59, 16 December 2009 (UTC)

You might be correct. It would be good to find out. --Kate (talk) 17:32, 17 December 2009 (UTC)

I don't think we need any geographic limitations in our mission statement. It's enough to say we want to make the data available and accurate. It doesn't matter where. --Emacsen 17:48, 18 December 2009 (UTC)

As long as we're not imposing US community mapping standards on another country *cough* British highway=* *cough*, I don't have a problem with that. --DiverCTH 18:04, 19 December 2009 (UTC)

I also would propose removing the terms "open source" from the mission statement. That is a really loaded, political term. --Emacsen 17:48, 18 December 2009 (UTC)

Removing "open source" is fine with me, though some similar wording is needed to convey that we are about free, open data. I can't think of good wording right now. --Kate (talk) 20:24, 21 December 2009 (UTC)

Do any other terms fit? I know there's a flamewar going on in the talk@ group right now about the license rewrite, but I for one don't want to see my work end up being Tivoized.

For comparison:

• http://www.cancer.org/docroot/AA/content/AA_1_1_ACS_Mission_Statements.asp
• http://www-archive.mozilla.org/foundation/statement-of-direction.html
• http://bit.ly/6CEJEF (American Red Cross)
• http://www.pbs.org/aboutpbs/pbsfoundation/
• http://www.transparency-usa.org/who/mission.html

--Kate (talk) 17:32, 17 December 2009 (UTC)

Comments from the Mailing List

Steve Fri, 18 Dec 2009 07:58:57 One of the things we did in the beginning of OSMF is say, roughly, what the budget would be spent on. Therefore, if you prioritized the list of goals and assigned rough budget %'s to them you avoid a lot of problems over what to focus time, money and effort on 1, 2 or 5 years down the line. Doesn't mean they need to be set in stone, but right now everyone might have different ideas over what the most important bits are.

Chris Hunter Fri, 18 Dec 2009 10:52:04 -0500 Guess I'll go ahead and toss out the first ideas on this one too. I'll let someone else write the wiki this time around, but here's my list of potential spending priorities:

1 - Legal / Licensing (especially data acquisition @ the state and county government level) 2 - Mapping Party support (getting equipment checkout set up) 3 - User Education & Outreach - (getting local hiking/biking/geocaching clubs involved) 4 - Media outreach (Newspapers & TV stations love to have "human interest" stories like this in reserve for slow news days. Take a look at the geocaching.com weekly newsletter - they have a canned article that gets printed in one form or another several times a week.) 5 - Software development

Comments...

• Part of user education & outreach would be holding periodic conferences, like US State of the Map. I think this would be the key event each year. Depending how we do with sponsorships or how much we charge attendees, it will be a significant expense or perhaps we would have some budget surplus that could go towards funding chapters activities during the year.
• Mapping party support could include securing meeting spots, such as at an university. Also, it might be good to have some small amount of $ to have pizza or something to eat for mapping party participants.
• In addition to software development, I think there is some interest in having servers in the US. These might end up being caching servers, or perhaps we want to support something like what Wikimedia Germany is doing in running the toolserver (http://toolserver.org/).

--Kate (talk) 19:57, 21 December 2009 (UTC)