Tag Archives: OSMF

Nominate yourself for the OSM Foundation Board Elections by October 22!

The OpenStreetMap Foundation logo

Here’s an opportunity to get involved in the OpenStreetMap Foundation, the nonprofit that supports the OSM project!

The OpenStreetMap Foundation Board elections are coming up in December, and there are three seats that will be open. If you’re interested in running, the deadline to nominate yourself is coming up, October 22, 2022 at 23:59 UTC.

About the OpenStreetMap Foundation Board of Directors

The seven-person Board of Directors works on OSM Foundation matters on a volunteer (unpaid) basis and is elected by the OSM Foundation membership.

The board meets regularly to work on administrative, policy, and fundraising issues, to vote on resolutions and to support the OSMF Working Groups, which are also composed of volunteers. The Working Groups are always looking for help too! 

For the December election, the terms of Board members Eugene Alvin Villar, Jean-Marc Liotier and Tobias Knerr are expiring, so their seats will be available. (They also may choose to run again.)

If you’re interested in running yourself, or know someone who might be, there is more information about nominations and the elections here. You can nominate yourself!

Board members serve two year terms and may be reelected a few times, with a term limit of three terms in the last eight elections. (You can get more information about board term limits in sections 33 and 34 of the OSMF Articles of Association. The Articles of Association are the rules and guidelines of the OSM Foundation.)

The Board elections start December 3rd and close December 10th. You can see more key dates here.

Monthly board meetings are open to OSMF members to observe or ask questions. You can find minutes of past meetings here.

Why you should run for the Board

We always need board candidates! Consider it yourself or ask someone else who you think might be good for the next OSMF board election, which will take place on the 10th of December, 2022! 

Why run for the board? Below you can read the personal views of current and past board members:

(Please note that in order to run, you need to be a Normal OSMF member 28 days before the election, not an Associate one, and you must have been a member during the full 180 days before the election.)

If you’re not already a member of the Foundation, it’s a great way to support the OpenStreetMap project, voice your opinions and also become eligible to vote in Board elections. You can learn how to join the OSMF here, which can be free if you are an active contributor to OSM.

Note: translations for this post are to come.

About OpenStreetMap

The OpenStreetMap Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation, formed to support the OpenStreetMap Project. It is dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free geospatial data for anyone to use and share. The OpenStreetMap Foundation owns and maintains the infrastructure of the OpenStreetMap project, is financially supported by membership fees and donations, and organises the annual, international State of the Map conference. Our volunteer Working Groups and small core staff work to support the OpenStreetMap project. Join the OpenStreetMap Foundation for just £15 a year or for free if you are an active OpenStreetMap contributor.

Play a role in shaping OpenStreetMap

This year, OpenStreetMap reached the milestone of 1 million map contributors. Did you hear about the amazing sessions and everything interesting happening at the State of the Map conferences happening across the globe? This community is growing — what will make this journey better? YOU being a part of it.

If you are a map enthusiast, working hard to keep OpenStreetMap up-to-date, participate and organise mapping events, love teaching folks the nitty gritty of OpenStreetMap, share and write diaries or blogs about OpenStreetMap — if you aren’t a member already, then you should join up and support the OpenStreetMap Foundation

OSMF Working Groups

We’re running a membership drive from now until mid-November. Sign up now. We are already 800 members worldwide! You can help by liking, retweeting, or spreading the word about the Membership Drive to friends or at local events/conferences.

Some questions that you might have:

Why should I join?

  • Keep OpenStreetMap’s servers running: OpenStreetMap is the world’s biggest user-generated map, free for everyone to use.
  • Support our volunteer working groups: Our Working Groups keep OpenStreetMap safe from vandalism and legal threats, resolve licensing issues, organise conferences, keep our hardware and software up to date, and many other things.
  • Enjoy discounts to OSM events: The annual State of the Map conference offers significantly cheaper prices for OSM Foundation members.
  • Show your support for OpenStreetMap.

What are the things that I could do once I become a member of OSMF?

  • You’ll have an official voice in the governance of the Foundation — the organization which owns and maintains the servers, holds the license, runs the State of the Map, coordinates local chapters.
  • Influence the future direction of the project.
  • Vote in the annual OSM Foundation elections for the board that steers the project.

I’d like to join but there’s currently no suitable money transfer facility for me

A membership fee waiver policy will be implemented soon – stay tuned!

Field Report of a Board Freshman

New foundation board member Peter Barth

One month has passed since the elections, so I decided to write down a little blog post about my impressions as a new board member. Even though I had listened into a board meeting and participated in an OSMF working group before, there were still many things to learn and new tools and processes to get acquainted with. This post is not super specific, but I still hope this will be an interesting read for others who are curious how the OpenStreetMap Foundation board works.

The infrastructure

Once the election results came in, everything happened quite quickly and we got a bunch of new accounts for various services. As you might remember, the election results were final on December 12, 2015 around 19:00 (CET). Less than 6 hours later, I was added to the internal board mailing list (the board@ address). Well, perhaps I was added earlier, but at 00:27 my first board mail arrived. This list is the main communication channel for the board and almost anything is discussed there. The address can be used by anyone, by the way, so if you have any matter to discuss you’re free to write to this address to reach the whole board – though reading is limited to the board directors. Just to give you an impression about the traffic, I got 266 mails until today on that list. Only 25 hours after my election I also got a personal @osmfoundation.org mail address which should be used whenever I want to speak as an official board member. Mails sent to these addresses are handled and, depending on the configuration, archived by Google.

The same day, we got accounts for the public OSM Foundation wiki and for the private wiki of the board. The latter is to be used for internal stuff, e.g. it now contains a primer page with all the stuff new members need to know. I haven’t changed much myself yet, but I read a lot and even though the wiki is not that large (about 30 pages), there is much information to process.

In addition the above, there’s a service called Loomio, which is used for deciding on board resolutions outside of meetings, so called circular resolutions. That seemed kind of superfluous to me, but it appears to have been introduced some time ago to make it easier to manage resolutions as there was a lack of clarity about status and conclusion and as resolutions via emails had a low number of participants. (When the first circular resolution of this term passed, Paul almost incredulously noted that this was the first time he ever saw all board members vote.). Anyway, the tool itself is neatly organized, easy to use and you can choose to receive email notifications when something happens within our group.

The board does not have a ticketing system, by the way, but has great human tracker: Paul. He collects items from the mailing lists and amazingly manages all that so nothing gets lost. Other than that, everyone has their own list of open items. Not everyone was happy with this, however, so we discussed whether to try something different this term. That’s why there will be a trial period where we use the issue tracker of GitHub to keep track of open tasks, assign tasks and so on. We’ll see how that turns out.

There are some other tools in use, too, but there were no special actions needed to set them up. For example, we use Doodle to agree on a date and we use Mumble for our meetings. We have an IRC channel to talk to each other, though seeing how not everyone is used to irc, it gets used to chat rather than discuss. And finally there is CiviCRM for the members’ database, accessible via a WordPress plugin. But it took me a while to get access to that one, as I did miss the invitation mail.

Legal obligations

As the secretary needs to submit an “Appointment of a director” form to the Companies House, I had to give some personal details to Paul, including my date of birth and my private address. It’s the directors’ duty to submit this information, as the details about the directors on the board have to be made public, according to British law.

I’m also working on getting access to our bank account as I was selected as a backup for our treasurer. After trying to get hold of someone explaining me how to do that and struggling to understand the London dialect of a nice lady from customer support at Barclays, I was glad that Frederik was able to help me. Eventually, I had to get an certified copy of my ID, fill out a bunch of forms and be very cautious to put my signature within given bounds to not invalidate these forms. And now I’m waiting to see what happens. If I’m unlucky, I’m going to have to travel to Frankfurt to appear in person at Barclays.

Getting started

So with all the preparations out of the way, what has the board worked on since the elections?

During the last few weeks, we processed a few tasks related to our working groups, such as budget requests. Unfortunately, there were also legal disputes affecting the DWG that the board had to deal with. We used the opportunity to talk at length about our interactions with working groups in general, and how to support their work without interfering with it. Naturally, there were different ideas and interesting discussions, and I expect that there will be small but exciting changes to come. As much of the actual work is done by the working groups, they form an integral part of the OSMF and OSM in general. Other than that, we also dealt with some inquiries by different NGOs, and of course there were mails from newbies like me, asking silly questions.

Whenever there are topics that need to be decided on, we use votes to form a consensus. Either at one of our Mumble meetings which take place one a month, or via Loomio as a circular resolution if the topic can’t wait or is considered simple enough to not warrant any discussion at a meeting. For something to get passed a simple majority is enough, and notably there’s no quorum to be reached. In theory, it would be possible to decide on something with only one vote in favor. (No, that hasn’t happened yet.)

Conclusion

Now that I’m getting more familiar with the way things work, I’m eager to work on the challenges I outlined in my agenda, and I’m sure my colleagues are, too. As always, the board is happy about any input or contribution on osmf-talk@, by direct mail or to the OSMF in general. Even if a matter is already discussed on the board, it feels good and necessary if the members discuss topics, suggest things and demand answers, too. So please continue contributing to osmf-talk@ to make it a livelier place.

And last but not least I hope that this post has been an interesting read that can help others who consider running for the board, contributing to one of the great working groups out there, or simply joining the OSMF as a member.

Peter Barth

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 Normal

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.

New Australian caching server

Posted to the talk-au mailing list some news from Grant Slater and the sysadmin team:

Have you noticed faster tiles this week? Australia now has a map caching server located in Brisbane. The server is used to speed up the standard tile.osm.org “Mapnik” map style.

Browsing the map on http://www.openstreetmap.org/ should now be more responsive. This new server, named ‘bunyip’, first started providing tiles on Tuesday.

We thank Kris Amy for providing the server and hosting. Thank you, Kris!

If anyone experiences any issues or hiccups, please let me know.

Technical: 

Server specs are here

OpenStreetMap tile servers use GeoDNS (PowerDNS with Geo backend) to locate the closest tile server. The DNS regions / cache-server can be viewed here.

To check which server you are being directed to use the command:
nslookup tile.openstreetmap.org
or
dig tile.openstreetmap.org

Regards
Grant – Part of OSM sysadmin team


Donation to OSMF by MapQuest/AOL

More great news for OpenStreetMap!  A gift of fifty thousand dollars has been donated by MapQuest/AOL to the OpenStreetMap Foundation. The funds follow an earlier donation by MapQuest to the Foundation in September 2010.

Donate today!

Donations to the OpenStreetMap Foundation enable OSMF to acquire and operate the infrastructure that makes OpenStreetMap work. Recently, this has meant exciting things like faster disks and more RAM for OSM servers, but it has also meant improvements in important but mundane things like back-up power and cabling.

Contributions from companies like MapQuest and from individuals like you are what keeps OpenStreetMap going. Your donations of local knowledge and GPS track files keep the OSM database growing. And your contributions of time, expertise and financial support allow the OSM infrastructure to grow with the database.

You can donate to OpenStreetMap with your credit card.