[Osmf-talk] Candidates: How will you know ... ?

[Henk Hoff]

Hello,

To start of with the last question. Bluntly: nobody knows.

There is an assumption in this question that "the community" is a
homogeneous group that has a very clear view of what it wants. That is not
the reality. With every decision that has been made there are people within
the community who are very much in agreement and people who strongly
disagree.

Back to the prologue. "Presume board to server the mappers community". To
my opinion that is not what the Foundation (and the Board's) primary goal
is. The Foundation exists to serve the OpenStreetMap project. In order for
the project to be successful, it needs a healthy mappers community and a
healthy map-user community. The one cannot go without the other.

The mapper community can do a lot of things completely by themselves. They
don't need the Foundation for lot's of things. They can decide what needs
mapping; they can decide who it's going to be mapped; they can decide
whether to use imports or not; etc etc.

What I have done, and what I'm intended to keep on doing when re-elected,
is going to OSM meet-ups. Like: hack weekends (e.g. I've been the the
Toronto hack weekend), OSM-meetups (I've been at several Mappersborrels in
the Netherlands, birthday party in London, some Stammtisch meetings in
Germany, etc), I've organized Q&A sessions at several Wherecamp meetups.
Etc etc. This all to meet the OSM "community" in person and try to get a
feeling on what's needed. These are ideal place to meet OSM-ers. Not only
the OSM-veterans, but also people who are interested in OSM, but are
hesitant to join.


Cheers,
Henk Hoff



On Mon, Aug 27, 2012 at 10:14 PM, Richard Weait <richard at weait.com> wrote:

> Dear Candidates,
>
> Presume that the board exists to serve the OpenStreetMap community of
> mappers.  If (re)elected, how will you know what the interests of that
> community are?  How will you know that you are representing the
> interests of that community in a way that that approve?
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/osmf-talk/attachments/20120827/5251a7d5/attachment.html>