[OSM-talk] What should the OSMF be doing?

[Mikel Maron]

> can you go into some more detail how you aim to achieve those? they're 
> all worthy aims; i particularly think osm needs to spread beyond europe, 
> for a variety of reasons


Personally, this past year I've been doing a great deal of outreach, training in promotion in the developing world. Spent a month leading OpenStreetMap mapping parties all across India. Worked with a group in Myanmar to set up OSM, and at the same time helped facilitate integration with the open source disaster management system Sahana. Last month I held a mapping party in Cairo. And right now, I'm in Amman, Jordan looking into mapping here, and soon the West Bank. Next month, we're travelling to Southern Africa, for FOSS4G, and plan to hold a series of OSM events. Will probably revisit India as well. Have ongoing discussions with the UN on data sharing, and we did get Sudan imported from them earlier this year.

>From the Foundation, I think there's a number of things we can do. The GPSTogo program is great, and we should expand that. I'd also like to facilitate learning exchanges -- once you've mapped your home town, we can connect volunteers to help run mapping parties in some other unmapped part of the world. And we should bring motivated mappers from other parts of the world to established communities; the next SOTM should have much better representation from the developing world. We would try to locate funding specifically to cover these travel expenses; and there are a number of NGOs and Foundations and corporations we could approach.

Membership drives and local chapters of some kind will help as well. I lean towards setting a set of guidelines for local chapters to operate by, and more courtesy recognition, rather than some official process of approval. But there may be a place for formal recognition, for instance in representing OSM to local governments. Open for discussion.

Dispute resolution. There's been a great deal of discussion, opinions and recommendations for dealing with edit wars. The spectrum of approaches should be collected and summarized, opened to some kind of comment period from the membership, then decided by the Foundation. Or perhaps we would open the options to a direct vote by the membership. Really, I think the Foundation should endeavor to not take on additional authority unless absolutely necessary, and I'd want this process and result to reflect that guideline. Once decided, any technical solutions would become high priority development tasks.

Finally, for data liberation, a white paper outlining OpenStreetMap and its goals, the arguments for freeing data, with case studies on, and interviews of, AND and the Canadian mapping agency (or another government entity). The goal would be a short paper which could be presented to governments and companies when discussions are opened on freeing data.


Looking at these, it's a very tall order, more than I could do alone. So as for all Foundation activities [http://www.opengeodata.org/?p=292], I'd be inviting volunteers to help with these efforts.

-Mikel
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