OMB

I’m standing for election to OpenStreetMap Foundation this year, here is a manifesto of sorts, what I want to achieve as part of the OSMF and how I’ll go about it.

I’ve been part of OSM for about 2.5 years and over that time I’ve been involved with lots of aspects of the project including mapping, coding, salvaging servers, administering websites, helping to organise the State of the Map conference and representing OSM at conferences and exhibits in Europe and North America. This year I want to become more deeply involved with the day to day work that goes on to make OSM run smoothly, so I’m standing for election to the OSMF board.

Over the last 18 months my main role within OSM has been helping to organise the SOTM conferences, along with other OSMF board members. I was involved with the planning of the most recent conference, starting in January 2008, taking the specific role of finding speakers, timetabling their sessions, collecting presentations and generally making sure everything ran smoothly. Organising the conferences has been hard, challenging work, but lots of fun too. With OSM growing so quickly, both in terms of absolute numbers and the number of countries covered, next year’s conference will become bigger and require more organisation from OSM volunteers. As an OSMF board member I would volunteer myself to look after the organisation of the conference - from the call for venues to the conference itself. Having an OSMF board member who is committed to helping organise the conference will help to make SOTM09 even better than the previous two year’s events, promoting OSM within the a wider community of open source and open data projects and attracting new mappers to our project.

Of course I would also be involved with OSMF’s other projects and activities which include promoting OSM, dealing with legal issues and funding servers and hosting. I’ve been deeply involved with the geographic industry for the last 5 years, giving me a lot of exposure to the mapping world. Working in surveying, GIS and software development has taken me to conferences, jobs and events around the world where I’ve loved promoting OSM to anyone who will listen.

Here’s a summary of what I would aim to achieve over a year as an OSMF board member:

• State Of The Map organisation. Help the conference grow by supporting the community in choosing a venue, organising logistics, helping with call for papers, helping with website set up and anything else needed by the hosts
• Accountability for OSMF. Helping OSMF to be more accountable to its members, publishing updates on the main things being worked on by the Foundation
• Promoting OSM. Representing OSM at conferences, shows and developer events around the world and most importantly helping to support other OSMers in their promotion of the project

If you have any direct questions, drop me an email or on Skype.

The OSMF Wiki Page has the following information about the elections:

Nominations for this election will close on Monday August 25th, 2008 and the vote for each position will be called and counted at the AGM on August 30, 2008.

If you want to vote, you need to be a member of the OpenStreetMap Foundation. You can join the OSM Foundation here. Membership costs just £15 for a whole year and entitles you to vote in the elections as well as helping to support the Foundation in its work.

Finally, thanks to TomH and Dutch for proposing me.