I’m running again this year for the HOT Board, my third election. I sincerely ask HOT Members for their vote and the opportunity to serve them in a fourth year on the HOT Board.

My history with HOT is now getting long, and my dedication to HOT stronger than ever (not difficult, with HOT more amazing than ever). I appreciate Robert Banick’s nomination and touching on some of that. I’ve also recently told the story of my HOT Year, including my time spent directly on HOT Board, which as Heather illustrated, is a substantial time commitment. While it’s varied recently with time off for my family, pretty fair to say that I voluntarily dedicate 20% of working time to HOT.

So like many of us, I have so many ideas for HOT, it’s hard to know where to start. Here’s my priorities for myself over the next year, touching on where I think HOT needs to focus and grow.

Raised many times in discussion lately, our Bylaws need to be updated, to better reflect the shape of our community, and clarify ambiguities. I led the process of developing the HOT Code, and am ready to facilitate the process with all interested members for the Bylaws.

Connected, there are many HOT processes sitting collectively in our heads, that don’t need to be enshrined in the Bylaws, but would be good to get these out objectively for us to better coordinate, in lightweight documentation. One recent example, would be a guidelines for administration of the tasking manager. We don’t want to over proscribe the process, but as quickly and clearly collectively illustrate the minimum we need to know.

Building on that, the HOT Guide is something I’d like to help move to first version. Ourselves as members, our broad volunteer community, we all have so many skills to contribute, many outside the usual line of the mapping we do so well. Making it easy for everyone to find ways to contribute to HOT is what the HOT Guide is about.

Something we have not done consistently in our project and activation work is evaluation, yet incredibly valuable for us to steer our work. I want to help enshrine this practice. HOT as an organization itself came out of a series of evaluation and strategy building following Haiti. The recent Haiyan OSM Assessment gives one example of ways we can begin to examine our work, and I hope over the coming months, events and groups in Philippines and elsewhere can also contribute to our learning.

Humanitarian partners are what make our mapping work relevant to disaster response and preparedness, and those relationships are a big part of what HOT manages. We’ve reached a profile and gravity where there are a lot of organizations involved in what we do beyond just using the data, and great potential for coordination. Tapping into this more and figure out what this looks like is something I want to pursue.

Finally, want to step up more in helping our Board be productive, continue to serve in leadership of the Board, and facilitate our process and communication and meetings well. A big part of that will be collectively setting our strategy for the year, and increasing bidirectional communication with members and the community, especially with more frequent reports on our activities and finances.

Thanks for reading all of this, and considering a vote for me.