Hey Mikel, excellent!

I agree with most of your points. Specifically the second and fourth from a board perspective are interesting and there is work to be done. We also need the HOT membership for this. Perhaps by giving them better channels to contribute they would be more inclined to do so. We are meeting on strategy tomorrow!

It may also be a good idea to invest some new resources in the membership and governance part of HOT. I think we are a bit under capacity for the challenges ahead.

On the final point, I think we are doing well on that now, let’s keep going! :)

Excellent suggestion about splitting up the advisory board and local chapters. We see a much more active engagement from local chapters in the LCCWG already now and it would be great to continue there. It’s a very strange thing to put corporates and local chapters together.

We also need a decent way for corporates to voice their concerns/ideas/suggestions preventing them from feeling the need to have say via a board position. Together with a decent COI policy that could fix a lot of problems.

As for term limits, I think we should set hard limits. I’m sorry to say but we need new people in the OSMF not more of the same, that clearly doesn’t work. I think it’s best in the long run to have more turnover in the board, even if that means missing out on experienced members. The board can always ask for help. Not the mention that it should reduce the number of personal issues getting in the way of work being done.

Another suggestion we heard from OSM-BE members: can’t we become OSMF members automatically when becoming a member of the local chapter. OSM-BE will be working on getting that done somehow!

We started a small project a while back where we send a message to all mappers who made a first edit in Belgium.

We got some responses and we at least point them to the mailinglists, website or twitter. I’m not sure but I think joost schouppe is still sending messages? In any case we could use some help on this still…

Making OpenStreetMap more welcome to newcomers I think is very very important!

Why is there always so much distrust in the average mapper? I think it is posible to implement a system like this and to help and educate newcomers.

It is also very easy to quality check once you know what an ID actually represents. A bank will stay a bank and a campsite will not change into a McDonald’s. Also the problem of mappers copying IDs to new objects is very easy to detect and respond to. An automated system could easily detect duplicated IDs that are new.

Some of the results there are back online:

http://osm.be/animap/

Hi Severin,

It’s ‘Ben Abelshausen’ ;-)

http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Ben%20Abelshausen

Good luck with your new GPS tracker! :-)

Some mappers here in Belgium had the same experience but they explained to the police and they could continue mapping without being arrested! A bit disproportionate this response!

I agree with your view on the addr:street tag.

I'm thinking of releasing some of the code I have written and used up until now but I need to reach an understanding with my employer before I do so...

I will definitely post another user story or mail to the osm-professional mailing list if anything changes.

I think the appearance can still be changed. I do have some issues with the way addresses are mapped and especially the way they are linked to a street (addr:street -tag). I'm thinking about using a relation for this.

I should be able to collect address data in though this way for antwerp-ghent and brussels!