[Osmf-talk] [Candidacy] AGM Foundation 2010 - Girona

[Lars Francke]

Hi!

Thanks Emilie for starting this thread. I too decided to run as a
candidate for the board election and while take this chance to
introduce myself.


Introduction

I am an active member of OSM since the end of 2008 and began by
mapping my hometown (like most of you I suspect). I used Tagwatch a
lot to find out which tags people use but wanted something better
which lead to OSMdoc.com. I also developed the tool that exports the
complete history of OSM data as well as all the GPS-traces. I'm also
active on the international-, the dev- and the german mailing list as
well as on IRC.
Outside of OSM I'm just a software engineer/architect but until now I
wasn't fortunate enough to have a job in which I could work on OSM.


Statement

OSM is a great project and it is exciting for multiple reasons. I
personally find it exciting because unlike other projects (wikipedia,
...) we produce data that is primarily intended for machine-use which
allows for some great use-cases as we all know. But we also have the
problems that come with it, one being the license issues that no other
project has faced so far. Another being that every contributor comes
to OSM with his/her own intentions and goals which obviously leads to
problems here and there. But in a whole I think we have a great and
diverse community (people mapping towns, air routes, the sea, ski
slopes etc. where else do you get so many different people and
interests working on the same project?).


Problems we should tackle

One major problem is the accessibility for new users. We don't always
make it easy for them and there's a lot that could be done. An
integrated OpenStreetBugs is one solution but I think we could also
benefit from an even easier solution for unregistered users to just
report bugs in our data. Our Wiki could use a clean up too and in
general there's a lot that can be done on the documentation front. One
thing we're pretty good at (at least in Germany) is our representation
on conferences, meetups and such things.

We need to make it easier for pretty much everyone to get started with
OSM. This includes companies; and I'm glad that the OSMF has tackled a
lot of the license issues in the past and will continue to do so.

We also need better communication between pretty much everyone. I
think the OSMF could do an even better job at keeping the users
informed, developers could communicate with each other to avoid a lot
of the duplicated efforts, etc. As has been stated multiple times we
also need specific contact persons/addresses for media and companies
so they have someone to deal with. I'd love to take at least part of
this responsibility (in Germany or elsewhere).

There are also a lot of projects dealing with OSM data. Most of them
are just "hobby" projects and run on one of the free dev-servers we
have. But there are a lot more projects in the pipeline that could use
resources. While not a core OSMF job I think we should help here where
we can because these are prominent projects and are often used as
examples for OSM. For this we need resources and there are companies
willing to donate these resources. I'd love to work on this and I've
already started in the last months.

But what we also need is better cooperation between those developers
to avoid duplicate efforts and I think OSM could benefit from a few
"hackathons" as they are usual in other projects. Currently these
mainly exist in the UK and I'd love to organize something in Germany.

Looking at the past Meeting Minutes of the OSMF board there are a lot
of open topics and I'm sure I'll find something that could benefit
from my work.


Because it is a popular topic a few words on my opinion on the license issue:
I place all my edits in the public domain where/if possible (or a
similar license like CC0) and I'd love to adopt this as _the_ license
for OSM. I support however the change to ODbL as it seems to answer at
least some of the questions and problems that currently exist with
CC-BY-SA. In the end it will always be hard to find a license that
works for every country on the planet equally well. So while I support
the ODbL I hope a PD-like-license will be at least evaluated.

I'm happy for every vote I get and I'll be available to answer
questions via mail (or any other method you can find to contact me).
I'll also be at the SotM from Friday to Sunday.

Cheers,
Lars