Hello,

Below I have compiled recent news related to the OSM Foundation (OSMF) board’s work. Most of these are or are going to be publicly documented on the OSMF website, so if you follow the Atom feed for the board meetings’ page, you can skip this.

What this diary entry is

It contains my personal selection and recollection of recent OSMF board-related updates.

What this diary entry is not

It is not intended to include details or all OSMF board-related updates. For these, you can refer to the published board minutes. This entry has not been reviewed by the OSMF board.

Why?

Informing the OSMF members is important. The board minutes describe in detail what was discussed in public board meetings, but many people don’t have time or follow the Atom feed for the OSMF’s website recent changes. At some point, I was creating annual or more frequent updates for the whole Foundation, which was a lot of work during a short period, while other tasks were ongoing.

I’m posting this experimentally, and I’m going to see whether I can continue to do so semi-regularly.

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May 2026 OSMF board updates

The board had a meeting on Thursday, 28 May 2026.

Draft minutes are here and they include minutes of the Chairperson’s report by Craig Allan and the Secretary’s report by Dani Waltersdorfer.

Some highlights are below.

Disputed territories

Rewriting the information for officials and diplomats of countries and entities with disputed territories
Craig Allan (OSMF Chair) has drafted a revision of the document for officials and diplomats of countries and entities with disputed territories, which was approved in September 2013, and which is referred to by the Data Working Group (DWG) and the OSMF. Craig circulated the draft to the board for feedback and suggested to Simon Poole (former OSMF Chair, former LWG Chair and present during the May 2026 board meeting) to review the updated policy document.

OSM data licensing

… See full entry

Hello,

Below I have compiled recent news related to the OSM Foundation (OSMF) board’s work. Most of these are or are going to be publicly documented on the OSMF website, so if you follow the Atom feed for the board meetings’ page, you can skip this.

What this diary entry is

It contains my personal selection and recollection of recent OSMF board-related updates.

What this diary entry is not

It is not intended to include details or all OSMF board-related updates. For these, you can refer to the published board minutes. This entry has not been reviewed by the OSMF board.

Why?

Informing the OSMF members is important. The board minutes describe in detail what was discussed in public board meetings, but many people don’t have time or follow the Atom feed for the OSMF’s website recent changes. At some point, I was creating annual or more frequent updates for the whole Foundation, which was a lot of work during a short period, while other tasks were ongoing.

I’m posting this experimentally, and I’m going to see whether I can continue to do so semi-regularly.

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2026 OSMF budget

The 2026 budget of the OSM Foundation is now published. You can find previous budgets here. Please note that the board may revise the budget throughout the year.

April 2026 OSMF board updates

The board had a meeting on Thursday, 30 April 2026.

You can read the Secretary’s report by Dani Waltersdorfer and the Treasurer’s report by Roland Olbricht.

OSMF’s move to the EU

Craig Allan (Chair) committed to informing the community about the status of the OSMF’s move to the EU, after a comment by Simon Poole (former OSMF and LWG chair) during the April board meeting.

OSM Local Chapters and regional communities

OSM US Inc: The OSM US and OSMF Boards had a closed, introductory meeting on 2026-04-09. The OSMF board, after a comment by imagico (guest) during the April board meeting, said that it is open to meeting with other OSM Local Chapters, if they are interested.

… See full entry

As I’m involved in running the OSM Foundation board elections, I thought it would be interesting to share some statistics on the OSMF members who are eligible to vote this year, compared to last year.

Thanks and data sources

Thanks to:

• the volunteers of the Membership Working Group for looking after the database with the OSMF memberships and

• to Pascal Neis, for publishing OSM related statistics, e.g. average number of OSM mappers (mapping accounts active) per day and per country.

Regions of OSMF members eligible to vote

This year 1518 out of 1937 OSMF members (as of 2022-12-07), from 96 countries, are eligible to vote in the 2022 board election. The regional distribution is shown on the image below and the table is also on the OSM wiki.

Notes:

… See full entry

As the OSMF administrative assistant, I have been supporting the volunteers of the State of the Map (SotM) organizing committee with conference organisational tasks since 2017. This is a brief report on my work for State of the Map 2022.

• 400 hours of my time were requested in 2022 by the State of the Map working group to help with the organisation of the State of the Map 2022 conference and were approved by the OSMF board.
• I ended up working for 307 hours on SotM2022 tasks, from February 2022 until October 2022 (excluding work during the conference). Most of the work started in April.

Board decisions

• 2022-05-17 Resolution 2022/12: Board approval of 200 working hours for Dorothea for State of the Map 2022 in advance
  
• 2022-07-21 Resolution 2022/15: Board authorisation of an additional 200 hours for Dorothea on State of the Map working group tasks

I worked on the following:

SotM Sponsorships

Work included but was not limited to:

• Communicating with sponsors about available sponsorship tiers, answering questions, sending reminders about unused voucher codes for sponsor tickets etc.
• Tracking sponsorships on the SotM Gitlab repository and elsewhere.
• Arranging creation of invoices and sending them.
• Filling forms for registration on sponsors’ supplier portals and acquiring additional documents they needed.
• Creating accounts for OSMF on sponsors’ supplier portals.

SotM Visa-application support

• Providing invitation letters and additional support for Visa applications (to travel grantees/scholars and non-scholars)
• Communicating with applicants and embassies when additional Visa-support was needed

SotM travel grants/scholarships

In addition to creating invitation letters for the travel grantees/scholars, work included:

• Communicating with scholars and answering questions
• Providing documents for Visa application (see above)
• Organising reimbursements
• Arranging flights in exceptional cases

Additional SotM tasks

… See full entry

The State of the Map 2022 (SotM) international conference will start in a few days. It will be the first in-person conference after the Covid19 pandemic started and thanks to the SotM volunteers, it will be a hybrid event.

While participating in SotM can be exciting for community members, it can also be stressful for introverts or people who plan to attend but want to minimise their social interactions due to Covid. Additionally, there are people who would like to approach others to talk to them, but may feel apprehensive doing so.

Trying to help with the above, this year I will bring some coloured communication pin-back buttons that community members can get and wear during the conference. The aim is to facilitate participants’ communication by making it easier to show if you want other people to talk to you at a given time or not.

What coloured communication pin-back buttons you can get at State of the Map 2022

The idea is that participants can wear a different button based on their communication preferences at the time. Showing a

• green pin-back button: the person is actively seeking communication and wants to be approached by people interested in talking.
• yellow pin-back button: the person wants to be approached by people they had discussions before. The person may approach other people to talk (if they wear an appropriate button or none at all), and that is ok.
• red pin-back button: the person probably does not want to talk to anyone or just to selected people. The person may approach other people to talk (if they wear an appropriate button or none at all), and that is ok.

If someone talks to you even if your button indicates that they shouldn’t, please keep in mind that they might not know about these buttons.

… See full entry

Hi all :)

My name is Dorothea. I’ve been helping the OpenStreetMap Foundation board and some of the Working Groups in the past year, as an Administrative Assistant (one of two independent contractors that the Foundation has - the other one being the accountant). So, for transparency reasons I would like to give you a better idea of what I do and also my view of what being at the Board encompasses - based on my experiences from the previous year.

What I do

Basically I am helping the board (and some of the Working Groups, if there is time and they want to) with administrative tasks, so they can have more time to focus elsewhere. So far I am mainly involved with:

• Documenting board meetings
• Documenting procedures on the board wiki
• Dealing with Corporate Memberships

Some non-regular tasks:

• Administrative support during Local Chapter applications
• Adding Advisory Board members to the AB mailing list and updating the wiki
• Providing membership lists

Infrequent:

• Documenting Local Chapter Congresses (2016, 2017)
• Documenting the Face-to-Face meeting (2016 # on the board wiki)
• Implementing the new Corporate Membership Payment system on CiviCRM (2016)
• Running the Election to Board (2017)

Working Group related

Two Working Groups have asked for administrative support from the board

• Licensing Working Group: Documenting online meetings
• State of the Map Working Group:
  • SotM2017 - Supporting scholars
  • SotM2018 - (Plan for) Supporting scholars (if there is going to be a scholarship program) and sponsorship

Time allocation

This can vary from month to month, with a cap of 65 hours per month. This was surpassed at least once before State of the Map 2017, as one of the scholars required extra support in order to get his visa (there was no Embassy of Japan in his country).

An overview of the time allocation is supplied monthly to the board. I also have a monthly meeting with the Secretary.

An inside view of the Board’s work

… See full entry