I have been an active OpenStreetMapper since 2007 (and an OSMF member since early 2016), and have been organising Mapping Parties in my local city of Brisbane, Australia since 2008 (although both activities were a bit quiet for a few years in the middle there - sorry about that!). I want to join the OSMF Board to primarily help increase representation from the AU/NZ/South Pacific Region, and indigenous populations worldwide, and secondarily to bring my decades of expertise in machine-learning to the upcoming challenges of integrating automated mapping with the local-community focus that should always drive OSM contributions.
Since coming back into OSM solidly in the last 5 months, I have re-caught the mapping bug big time. I have mapped locally, and across the world for the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, every single day since July! I am working on re-ramping up my involvement in the project significantly, and I am performing outreach in the local spatial community to increase the awareness of both OSM and the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team. I particular enjoy teaching and introducing new members to the project, and have run two Missing Maps events, alongside other local Mapping Parties, and I will continue to organise events locally every month.
I am an active participant of HOT mapping efforts, and I believe strongly in the ability of remote mapping to provide a great starting point for local communities to take ownership of their maps. In fact, I believe that this is the first and foremost principle of OpenStreetMap, that if anything is taking away, or discouraging, local ownership of the map it is probably not a good idea.
If elected, I would seek to improve the representation of the needs of Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific mappers towards the OSMF Board. In particular, I am very interested, and already working towards, how the OpenStreetMap project and communities can extend our community, models and techniques towards indigenous populations around the world. Indigenous populations often look at the world differently than the Euro-centric origins of the OpenStreetMap project, but I believe that some of the valuable lessons already learnt by HOT in how local disadvantaged communities can take ownership of their maps can be extended and improved upon for the indigenous populations of Australia, New Zealand, the South Pacific, and around the world. To be clear, I am not indigenous myself, but I am in already in the process of building relationships to work towards this goal in the Greater Brisbane area, then hopefully across the entire region, and the world!
One other aspect that I would like to bring to the board will be the present and future impact of automation, machine-learning and/or artificial intelligence on OpenStreetMapping, both generally and specifically for Humanitarian Mapping. It might appear that this is antithetical to my belief in local communities owning local maps, but that is why I want to focus on using these powerful techniques in ways that promote, rather than degrade, local ownership.
I have more than a decade of machine-learning experience, and I want to investigate existing techniques in development by Facebook, Development Seed and others, and develop new ones, and I am working with a team at the University of Queensland to begin a study on how these and similar techniques can be opened to all mappers through the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Tasking Manager and editing tools in a way that ensures that remote and local mappers are assisted directly in our mapping tools, rather than having the output of an algorithm imported widescale without their direct involvement in the process. I am in particular interested in efforts that can focus on getting ML to people on the ground in things like FieldPapers, and in apps like StreetComplete, Kort and OpenMapKit. We need many more of these great simple-survey focussed approaches, and I think ML can help with guiding these efforts.
You can find out more about me at https://dbdean.com, and my OSM profile at https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/David%20Dean contains links to my many OSM-related activities. If you have any questions, or want to get in contact, please don’t hesitate to ask me here, by email at ddean@ieee.org, or at the Election to Board Talk Page at https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:Foundation/AGM17/Election_to_Board, where I will begin to wade through the many existing questions shortly.
Thanks, and Happy Mapping!
Location:
OpenStreetMap
