OpenStreetMap Foundation Face2Face Meeting: Day 1

Today was the first Face to Face(F2F) meeting I’ve participated in as a OSMF board member. Though I had met the rest of the board, this was the first time I’ve been together with them since my own election. In today’s day of video conference, IRC, Skype, Etherpad and many other forms of remote collaboration, it is still great and productive to be together. Allen Gunn (Gunner) of Aspiration Tech has been facilitating us. This is the first F2F in recent memory that has been facilitated, but I can’t compare it to the previous one. Having someone help us focus on outputs and avoiding getting stuck on topics however has been invaluable.

There were multiple key exercises today that helped us both realize where we agree/disagree as well as prioritizing efforts for the board over the next year. We started off the day with an exercise where a line is set-out in a room and participants stand on a point of their choosing in response to a stated proposition – one end is “strongly agree” the other end is “strongly disagree”. What became clear is really there is not the extreme differences we may have thought we had. I think if the membership of the foundation were to ever meet and do this we’d discover the same thing.

Photo Credit: Paul Norman

The other exercises were on specific topics. We used similar techniques to list, prioritize and evaluate the outputs. The topics we worked on were: what we see as our core values, what we want to accomplish over the next year, what is/is not working in OSM, and what is the responsibility of the OSMF board vs the OSMF Foundation as a whole. We’ll be sharing this information out with the community in a more robust feedback this week. First we need to finish transcribing our Post-it Notes. I’m excited about our initial results so far and I’m feeling energized and excited to continue.

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