OMB

I’ve been doing some research as part of the Foundation’s goal to establish a framework for local OSM chapters to be Federated to the Foundation. The idea is that a local or special interest group will be able to set up a formal relationship with the OSM Foundation, allowing them to hold local mapping parties, events, conferences and so on under the broader banner of the Foundation. Federated groups or chapters will also be able to represent themselves to other official bodies – Governments and media organisations being two examples.

Quite a bit of work has already been done on this by the OSM-F Board, lead by 80n, so I’m not starting from cold. Most of the research I’ve been doing today has been into the Mozilla Foundation, who have been recommended as a good template for a central Foundation with federated members. The next step is for me to contact some local OSM leaders and present the OSM Foundation’s current proposal to them to get some feedback – I’ll be doing this over the next 7 days.

More info on the OSM Wiki. As always, if you have questions or would like to be involved with the work of the OSM-F, get in touch

We’ve just released the call for venues for the State of the Map 2009. The conference will be held on the 11th – 12th July 2009, so book you time off now. We want this years conference to be even better that last years, which is why the Foundation started working on the organisation in September.

If you would like to host this year’s event, take a look at this post. I’m going to be on holiday next week, so I won’t be doing any Foundation work. I’ll be catching up with Foundation emails as soon as I return.

One of the things I emphasised when standing for election to the OSM Foundation Board was the need for transparency and communication of Board activities to the membership. This is something I’m going to be working on consistently over the next 11 months. This post is the start of the first phase of the work. I’m going to keep a record of the work I do for the Foundation and try and communicate my work as clearly as possible. A lot of the work happens in bits and pieces – I grab 20 mins on a train or plane to read and write emails, draft press releases and so on. I’ve also set aside 2 hours on Thursday mornings for OSM-Foundation related work, so I’d anticipate these updates following those session.

Lets get going. Today I’ve been working on:

• Drafting a press release for the GPStoGO program’s first unit loan. I’m aiming to get the release out by the end of the week.
• Drafting an announcement for the call for venues for the State of the Map 2009. The announcement should be out by the end of the week and will invite proposals for venues to host the 2009 event.
• Catching up on Foundation emails, particularly regarding the License work, which is an ongoing effort for all of the Board members

Upcoming actions next week include getting up to speed on the process of setting up local OSM Chapters. I have a call with some other Foundation members tomorrow, after which I’ll be getting in touch with some OSM people around the world with the aim of getting local OSM chapters set up.

You can subscribe to my posts about my OSM-F work by clicking on this link.

For all Foundation related requests or info, please email me at nick@osmfoundation.org