HOT members - welcome to the 2021 election cycle! If you’ve been considering running for a board seat, or simply my informal take on things, read on!

This year, we have several unique factors at play:

• HOT has just entered (as of July) its second year of implementation of Audacious Project implementation, working toward a goal of engaging 1 million contributors to map an area home to 1 billion people across 94 countries.
• The organization has gone through a period of rapid change in the past 12 months, opening two regional hubs, adding roughly 45 staff members, doubling our annual budget, and putting the organizational foundations in place to dramatically scale up community support. We’ll continue to scale from 2021-22.
• The environment around us has also changed dramatically, opening up new possibilities with recent technical advances and forcing us to re-think ways of working under Covid-related movement restrictions.
• Lots more has been happening: see our Annual Report (I’ll write more on where we stand and where we’re heading next month).
• Amidst all of this, five of seven board seats are up for grabs.

I’ve been reflecting on this. As someone who works to serve and expand the open mapping / OpenStreetMap movement every day, what would position HOT in the best way to support the movement? Given the changes and uncertainty, what specific skills would add the most value? What specifically do we need coming out of this year’s Board of Directors election cycle?

I’ve come up with a rough grouping of skills and experiences that have the potential to add significant value as part of HOT’s Board of Directors. HOT has an incredible diversity of lived experiences in our membership, though, so if you don’t see your particular experience here, it doesn’t mean it wouldn’t benefit HOT.

In no particular order, here’s my top five archetypes:

The serial entrepreneur or tech trend-setter

This year, through user-centered design, we’ll be making major decisions on tools that get more data into OSM (for example, mobile) and making tools that make data more useful and impactful coming out of OSM. So - what’s happening outside the OpenStreetMap world that we can learn from? Have you launched or scaled a successful or failed tech startup? Worked in one? Are you leading open source software projects? Geospatial projects? Digital transformation and digital strategy? Have you grown and scaled teams or projects in a serious way? HOT needs you!

The regional tour guide

By early 2022, we’ll have regional operations in four regions. Everything we do will revolve around partnering with OSM communities, tech startups, governments, and NGOs in each region. This is where lived experience and working with a variety of people in data-related roles really counts - if you find yourself frequently talking with donors, government officials and NGOs in multiple countries in your region, HOT could deeply benefit from your ideas, knowledge about ways of working, insight into decision makers and key players, and relationships!

The legal beagle

As HOT grows, there are many interesting legal questions to consider from intellectual property to employment law to humanitarian law issues to data ethics and privacy. IN particular, this year will see the rollout of a new responsible data function. Even if you’re not an attorney, if you’ve worked for one, served as a paralegal, or done research on any of these issues, your expertise is incredibly valuable.

The financier (not the cake)

Funding is great, but what we really could use here is your expertise and advice. Our fantastic Finance Committee chair Rob Baker is wrapping up his term. If you’ve managed large departmental or organizational budgets, HOT needs you! If you manage investments personally or professionally and can help us make decisions on how best to invest donations, HOT needs you! If you’ve worked on an audit for another NGO, that’s certainly useful. If you’re a chartered accountant or certified financial planner or investment manager, that’s great, and I’d also encourage you to consider what skills or experience you have even outside your day job that might be relevant.

The humanitarian disruptor

Some have reckoned Covid is the great disruptor of traditional humanitarian structures. Certainly, it has brought into clear focus the need for the open mapping movement: decentralized, not reliant on cross-border deployments, locally-led, accountability to affected populations. If you are working on these topics in the humanitarian space, what can HOT share, and what can HOT learn? What partnership opportunities do you see? How should this impact technology design? HOT could benefit from your advice.

…

Board members sometimes think of their commitment in terms of “time, talent, or treasure” (treasure referring to financial contributions to their organization). HOT is in an extraordinarily fortunate position. We have been entrusted with investments from multiple, forward-thinking donors to support and spread the open mapping movement. We now need the talent, the ideas, the partnerships, the vision and yes, a little bit of time to make it all happen. I expect our Board to continue evolving so a board seat commitment will mean minimizing time spent on administrative matters, since we now have increased staff support, and opening up space to think big, boldly, and strategically together.

Wrapping up, two final thoughts. First, what we need above anything else is your passion for HOT’s mission and dedication to making our vision a reality. Everything else is a plus. Second, as Executive Director, I see my relationship with the Board as one of equals, one of partners, in which we both bring different but complementary abilities to the table. Technically, the ED reports to the Board of Directors, but in reality, we each do very different things. We listen a lot to each other, coach each other, serve as thought partners, sometimes disagree, but always have the best interests of HOT in mind.

I am truly looking forward to working with all five board members with new terms in addition to Felix and Trudy as they continue in their terms. Please comment or get in touch if you’d like to talk more anytime.

-Tyler

It is a privilege to address 2020’s humanitarian OpenStreetMap Summit today. This year marks HOT’s 10th anniversary, and my own 5th anniversary with HOT starting from 2015. Today’s theme is the past, present and future of humanitarian OpenStreetMap and we have been thinking a lot about the future.

I wanted to share my Summit address (which you can watch here) on an OSM diary simultaneously, so that people can engage in the comments if they want to.

This is something of a statement of intent for HOT within the humanitarian and OpenStreetMap ecosystems and, while it has been shaped by many conversations with community groups, collaborators and contributors in the universe in which HOT exists, it only seeks to represent my own perspective and some of the recent thinking within HOT the NGO. Please think of it as an early draft and a contribution to a conversation.

I also acknowledge that HOT’s presentation of itself has increasingly highlighted our successes while smoothing over or not acknowledging challenges and failures. Today’s Summit features “failfest” sessions for the first time where friends and colleagues are sharing learnings from where they didn’t necessarily get it right. This statement is not about what we’ve gotten right, but about how we’d like to embrace a stronger culture of feedback and learning and hope that, by doing so, we can achieve great things, with all of you.

This year, we received the phenomenal news of our selection as one of eight world-changing ideas by TED’s Audacious Project. In 2019, the HOT voting members told us they wanted an area home to one billion people living in countries experiencing high risk of disaster or high poverty levels, added to OpenStreetMap. We took them seriously and pitched to Audacious Project investors the idea of mobilising one million humanitarian OpenStreetMap contributors as a way to achieve this. After months of work and multiple stages of application and assessment, several extraordinary philanthropists behind Audacious invested in this vision.

However, we know that even if these headline ambitions are achieved, we will have failed if there are not also active and sustainable OpenStreetMap ecosystems in many of the 94 priority countries once the Audacious Project finishes in 2025. The approach over the next five years must be community-centred and strive for local sustainability and local power as key outcomes.

This is a gamechanger for HOT and, hopefully, for the ecosystem in which we exist. The project funding model that we’ve relied upon in the past has meant an underinvestment in longer-term community support and contributions. This can now change. But, before it does, we know that serious self-reflection is needed.

First, we need to recognise what HOT is and isn’t. Ten years ago the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team could more or less describe all humanitarian-focused OpenStreetMap contributors. The numbers of people and initiatives were relatively small and the players heavily networked. Today, that is no longer true, but we intentionally continued to use the word ‘HOT’ as a catch all, in a genuine, but perhaps naive attempt to be as inclusive as possible. That was a mistake. In conversations over the past months, some people have made it clear to us that this can be problematic. When we refer to HOT communities or the ‘wider HOT community’ or Tasking Manager users as ‘HOT community members’, we can make the mistake of associating groups of people and their work with HOT, even where they haven’t themselves chosen that association. We understand now that, for those groups, this can feel like HOT taking credit or assimilating and, while this was never our intention, we will stop doing this. We of course welcome all who share our mission to consider themselves part of the HOT family, while doing so on their own terms.

In fact, in trying to work through this and define what we mean by ‘HOT’ and ‘community’, we came to a realisation that maybe it is not our role to do this defining… groups contributing to OpenStreetMap already define themselves and that is as it should be, just as many contributors define themselves as part of one or many groups. Maybe our role is to work out what HOT should be in relation to them in order to achieve the ambitions articulated through the Audacious vision.

A friend from the OSM Africa network recently told us: “Communities stop talking to HOT because HOT only talks about HOT”. We recognise that while HOT was instrumental in creating and nurturing the space for dialogue and collaboration to happen around humanitarian use of OpenStreetMap, recently we have too often ended up occupying that space. We will now work towards contributing as a valuable and active constituent part of a much larger network and ecosystem.

To achieve our Audacious goals, we know that HOT needs to be a part of a movement that champions local people, local devices and open knowledge and data to solve local problems. The movement needs to be inclusive, representative and value must flow across it in multiple directions. The resources that come from the Audacious prize can be instrumental in supporting this, but only if they enrich the movement as a whole.

In any ecosystem, money and resources equal power. The microgrants programme is a great example of where HOT has been successful in developing a mechanism to redistribute money from donors and funders to local communities trying to solve local problems. We need to work out how to be much more radical, though. One example is putting community support funding decisions in the hands of OSM-related groups in each region. And supporting the already great work led by local OSM groups, in established and emergent local NGOs, in INGOs and across OSM in places such as the Local Chapters and Communities Working Group and the OSMF. We need help working out how to best contribute to these initiatives and aims, how to turn HOT into a community amplifier, into a humanitarian OSM super-spreader, into a vehicle for people who want to save or improve lives, alleviate suffering and restore dignity using open data, tools and knowledge.

What does this mean, practically? Beyond this statement, we have already started to operationalise this intent.

FIRST You may have noticed that this event is no longer called the HOT Summit, but the humanitarian OpenStreetMap Summit - a space and time for all those who care about open data for humanitarian action to come together, share and learn. We are happy to resource and coordinate the event, but it must serve h.O.S.M not just H.O.T. This small step is the start of a process of de-occupation of the humanitarian OpenStreetMap space by HOT - think mailing lists, working groups, communication channels. For this world-changing movement to map our world to get bigger, we at HOT must create space for others to evolve and lead. Supporting the movement, inspiring it, amplifying it, but not controlling, or defining it - and making sure we get out of the way! As one small example of this, we have committed to stop opening new long term country offices and will support our country office staff in transitioning to fully independent local entities in 2021.

SECOND We have committed to resourcing four regional hubs as part of the Audacious project, moving decision-making and resources away from a remote, global team and closer to where we want to support people and communities. How these hubs evolve is something we need help with, particularly from contributors and communities in those regions.

THIRD We also commit to doing much more of our thinking in public. While it hasn’t been through bad intentions, we have gradually stopped documenting our work, thinking, and decisions in the open. This leads to a less rich ecosystem, limits our contribution to a commons of open knowledge and makes it hard for others to have an open dialogue with us. As part of that, we are going to re-prioritize channels for constructive feedback, criticism, suggestion and discussion. We have further work to do on how we welcome and facilitate these conversations, but we have made a start at hotosm.org/feedback.

At the heart of this is the will to work out what it really means to be a community-centric NGO in this ecosystem. It’s not easy: we all truly are trying to do something that’s never been done before: a map of our world by and for the people of our world. 1 billion people, 94 countries - we need to think ambitiously, even audaciously, as local and international humanitarian and development partners are relying on us for data that can lead to life-changing impact. But as our OSM Philippines colleagues suggested, we also need to ask ourselves “Audacious for who?”

How do we transform HOT and make it something that enables people living in areas vulnerable to humanitarian crises or with high levels of poverty to achieve their own audacious goals? Coming back to the future of humanitarian OpenStreetMap. The future is not HOT. It is all of us here today, across hundreds of organizations and groups working to make an impact through data. Imagine the realm of what we could make possible, together, if we get this transformation right. Thank you for reading and I look forward to this conversation continuing.

By the way, if you didn’t manage to make it to the Summit and would like to see the presentations and discussions, the videos will be made available - details at the Summit website shortly.