My name is Eleanor Tutt and I live in St. Louis, Missouri. I’m passionate about maps, open data, community action, and (of course!) OpenStreetMap, which luckily combines all three. Over the past year, I’ve been actively contributing to and growing a committed St. Louis OSM community. As a board member, I would help out in whatever way possible, and I would especially like to:

1) Encourage participation of neighborhood organizations/block leaders

My day job is serving as a one person “data and maps shop” for Rise, a community development non-profit serving a four county area. In this role, I partner with neighborhood leaders to help them access, map, and interpret a wide range of neighborhood-level data. Our work emphasizes identifying and mapping assets such as schools, playgrounds, restaurants, gathering spaces - essentially, ideal OSM points of interest. I see a great opportunity for OSM US to work more closely with neighborhood leaders who are residents of and experts on under-mapped areas. These leaders already advocate for their neighborhoods at public meetings, in the media, in conversations over dinner - I want to encourage them to advocate for their neighborhoods on OpenStreetMap as well. One of the things I emphasize when I explain OSM to these new editors is that OSM gives individual people the power to shape the narrative of their city. I encourage them to map what matters to their community.

2) Continue support for editathons/mapathons

We’ve had great luck growing our OSM editor base in St. Louis through editathons, several of which I have organized. Our Cherokee Street editathon had two locations with different activities on opposite ends of a diverse commercial street. We partnered with a local art gallery and used Field Papers to increase participation from residents walking by (who may not have been carrying laptops or smartphones). For our Build for STL editathon, I encouraged editors (including nine new editors who had not heard of OpenStreetMap previously) through a friendly competition, with a score board and a trophy made out of an old globe, mouse, and LED lights. For these events and others, support from the national level in terms of organizing, publicity, and education/tutorials about available tools has been key, and I’d love to contribute to that work.

As I add my name to the list, I see that there are already many other highly qualified candidates. If I am not elected, I still look forward to working with them and becoming more involved at the national level in 2015. I thank the OSM US community for giving me the opportunity to run!