I’m Lauren Jacobson and I’m running for the OSM board in order to further strengthen the OSM community through targeted outreach and community building projects.

I’m a geographer from Cleveland Ohio currently living in Washington DC. For years I worked within my company to promote better work with OSM. I recently joined Development Seed, the folks with the really great Lego table at SotM, which has given me the opportunity to be more engaged in the broader community. In the past year, I attended SotM US and SotM LatAM, participated in HOT activations in Chile and Tanzania, and am currently working to import 268,000 building footprints from Zambia. I’ve also had great experiences doing outreach about OSM at events in DC, from leading GeoDC, a monthly meetup of map and OSM lovers, to teaching an introduction to mapping session at DC’s all female hackathon. Through these experiences, I’ve seen such great potential for growing a more diverse OSM community and am inspired to make a contribution.

As an OSM US Foundation Board Member I would:

• Promote local project creation and involve more community leaders with OSM projects

I recently participated in a Mapping DC event using field papers. We were stopped on the street by numerous people who were genuinely interested in the project and what we were doing. It is clear to me that so many more people would love to get involved with OSM, we just need to create the opportunities. We also have a great network of volunteers who would love to be ambassadors for OSM. I’ll extend the resources that are available to OSM members who want to organize mapping parties, set up OSM booths at farmers markets, or neighborhood block parties. I would also work to improve existing tools for event hosting and publicity on the OSM wiki and provide mentorship and guidance to help OSM volunteers find each other on the local level.

• Encourage diverse participation at State of the Map US

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