How can we improve the gender balance in participation and in map content? There are some amazing leaders and best practices across the global OSM community.

Before the holidays, we had a vibrant conversation on the OMSF mailing list about gender in OSM. Some great examples of inclusive participation include GeoChicas, YouthMappers, and Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team. It would be great to hear from women and other genders that are often rare voices. With such a large community, we know that there are more people doing great activities to improve engagement.

Kate Chapman and I would like to invite OSM to join us for an online discussion about OSM and Gender. Given that women and other genders are a often a smaller group in OSM, we ask that this conversation start with us. Then, we will be sure to include the wider community.

Some of the potential topics could be: opportunities and challenges to be more inclusive, program ideas to support diversity in OSM. We will define the agenda and next steps in the call. Then, we will report back via OSM diary entries.

Here is a Doodle to be filled out by Thursday, February 22nd at 1700 CET.

Once we collect the best times, I will announce by Friday Feb. 23rd. The first meeting will be held in the Europe, Africa and Americas Time zone.

[Doodle] (https://doodle.com/poll/h63dxtikfe2bvxsz)

The second meeting will be hosted in a timezone friendly for Asia (morning) and Western North/South America. (evening) The call will be hosted on mumble

The OSMF community cited some resources which reflect participation inquiries. Other resources are most welcome. Just add them into the comments.

• Martin Dittus http://search2.ucl.ac.uk/s/search.html?query=dittus&collection=ucl-discovery and http://martindittus.info/ about the impacts of missing maps activities. There is also some stuff at Lesya Palen group, too http://cmci.colorado.edu/~palen/papers.html
• Renate Steinmann, Elisabeth Häusler, Silvia Klettner, Manuela Schmidt and Yuwei Lin 2013: Gender Dimensions in UGC and VGI: A Desk-Based Study, http://hw.oeaw.ac.at/0xc1aa500d_0x002e6e72.pdf
• Monica Stephens, Antonella Rondinone (2012): Presentation at the Association of American Geographers’ Annual Meeting in New York: Gendering the GeoWeb, https://www.slideshare.net/geographiliac/gendering-the-geoweb
• J. Uhlmann, F. Tommasini, H.-J. Stark (2010): Presentation at the FOSSGIS e.V. annual meeting in Osnabrück, Germany: Empirische Untersuchung der Motivation von Teilnehmenden bei der freiwilligen Erfassung von Geodaten, Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz.
• Nama Budhathoki’s PHD thesis - https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/16956/1_Budhathoki_Nama.pdf

Thanks and looking forward,