OpenStreetMap
Thank you to all the OSMF members, fellow candidates, board, and outgoing board members. It has been a privilege to consider your priorities for OSMF via questions, notes, and conversations.
We are the community, the map, and the project. The lovely people who make OSM part of their daily flows count on all of us at OSMF to meet the full mandate and the full potential. This means considering, then building on how we might balance the growing, changing needs of the open, global, diverse community.
Over the past few weeks, the questions on the wiki and the conversations on this mailing list have pointed to some potential actions. Converting those requests and ideas into productive working documents for consultation is the next step. There are many people on this list and in the wider community that will contribute if there are healthy spaces and a clear ask. It is up to us in the membership, in the working groups, and on the board to make this possible.
Thank you again,
Heather
Discussion
Comment from nebulon42 on 10 December 2017 at 20:07
Congratulations Heather for being voted onto the board! I’d like to ask you two questions on topics that are important for me. Thanks for taking the time to answer them.
In your election campaign you repeatedly stated that you wanted to get into governance because of the “data/directed editing policy”. I think that the involvement of your employer (the international commitee of the red cross) with humanitarian mapping constitutes a conflict of interest for you here as the directed editing policy possibly could have an impact on your employers activity regarding humanitarian mapping.
How do you plan to handle this conflict of interest in relation to your goal to get into governance because of the directed editing policy?
I think it is great to have more women on the board especially since Kathleen stepped down quite early. I also think it is not a requirement that anyone on the board has experience with IT or software development. But I think mapping is quite important, because it enables you to relate to the community more and helps to better understand some of the problems the average mapper faces (probably) daily.
Do you plan to do some regular mapping maybe even outside of the humanitarian context if your time allows?
Thanks!
(I’m an OSMF associate member.)
Comment from Heather Leson on 17 December 2017 at 07:26
Thanks for your congratulations.
Regarding policies - The community and working groups will manage this issue. I am mostly concerned about how we consult and coordinate. Any major policy should have a framework of inclusive consultation. When I responded to the initial email about the “Directed editing Policy”, I asked for details on research had been conducted in relation to other global data projects or policy planning. This has remained unanswered. One recommendation I would like to make is that all the local chapters get input into this. The reality is that the mailing list is not the only forum to reach people. As for conflict of interest on this policy, I would ask that you consider all the board members in that criteria.
Your implicit questioning about my IT background has been answered. Regarding mapping, yes I do plan to improve on this area.
My questions for you and others on this front:
How do you think people should adjust their online behaviour to collaborate and negotiate with others who have different viewpoints or experience?
Heather
Comment from nebulon42 on 20 December 2017 at 21:00
Thanks for addressing my questions.
Of course I do. But I might have misinterpreted your intentions by the brevity of your statement.
I think you misunderstood me there. It is my opinion that having an IT background or not is really totally unimportant for being on the board. I just pointed that out because someone at Q&A wrote something along the lines of “your are on Github, but you only did …”. I didn’t like that quite much. I also found that one particular e-mail directed at you quite despicable. Yes I know that I also have written a not so nice e-mail at another occasion (not directed at you), but still nothing compared with that. But we learn and improve ourselves so I think.
Interesting and difficult question. The first thing is respect, obviously. But it is really easy to throw this overboard when communicating on the internet and not face to face. We will have to improve, but false generalisations like the whatever pit of something are no help (btw. Doesn’t this fall under the HOT CoC?). There might have to be guidelines but they need to stay low-level (less is more) and be quite explicit. We shouldn’t be tempted to overregulate also because we have to adjust to our cultural differences. We also have to make sure that regulations and guidelines are not used by those with control to silence critical voices. Vague guidelines might have the problem to be used for overregulation.
There is the board who can set this on its agenda. There is also the CWG that can help to have this implemented. Acceptance by the community is paramount here I think.