[Talk-us] Statistics of board candidate edits

[David Fawcett]

Robin,

Thank you for running for the board, and for your very convincing statement
describing why you would like to be board member.  When I think about the
membership of the boards of many corporations and NGOs, I often see people
who do not have a lot of direct experience with that corp/org's main
product.  They are on the boards because they bring skills, resources, and
energy.

It is clear that while you may not have a lot of editing experience, you
know what OSM is, you know the data, you see value in it, and you have
already done work to bring new people to OSM.  To me, the success of OSM US
is far more dependent on having leadership that can market to, evangelize
to, educate, and engage new mappers and data users than knowing the
intricacies of relations for turn restrictions on reverse-flow, limited
hours bike lanes.

David.

On Sat, Oct 4, 2014 at 11:42 AM, Robin Tolochko <robin.tolochko at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I considered not running for the board because of the low number of edits
> that I've done, but ultimately decided that I have a lot to contribute to
> OSM in other ways. It is anyone's prerogative to not vote for someone while
> taking edits into account, but I want to explain why I decided to run
> despite my low number of edits.
>
> I recently moved back to the U.S. after living in Bogota, Colombia, for
> the last four years. While living there, I used OSM data regularly in my
> job as a cartographer at an NGO and ran OSM workshops for local university
> students. I just moved to Madison, Wisconsin, where I am starting up a
> Maptime <http://maptime.io/about> chapter and plan to do an introduction
> to OSM as our first session. I have been wanting to get more involved with
> OSM, and I realized that I could put my community outreach and organizing
> to use by running for the board.
>
> As I and many other nominees stated, it's important to get new people
> involved. But editing OSM can be quite intimidating to a new person, and I
> would make it a priority to improve the on-ramp. I also think that we
> should take advantage of existing learning networks, like universities, to
> spread awareness of OSM and recruit more contributors. I know that these
> are ambitious goals, and they may take more than a year, but those would be
> my priorities on the board.
>
> I don't think it would be wise for the OSM U.S. board to be comprised
> entirely of inexperienced mappers, but I think it could benefit from having
> someone on board who brings a fresh perspective and could even be
> considered an "outsider." The future success of OSM, after all, depends on
> bringing more outsiders into the fold. Also, I did not make the decision to
> run for board lightly. I recognize that it would be a serious time and
> energy commitment, but serving on the board would take advantage of my
> strengths to give back to an organization that I deeply believe in.
>
> I'm happy to talk with anyone, so please feel free to reach out to me via
> email or Twitter <https://twitter.com/tolomaps>.
>
> Saludos,
> Robin
>
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