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OSM US Board Candidate Statement 2025

Posted by watmildon on 31 January 2025 in English.

About me

A photograph of the mountains near Gold Bar Washington. A range of rocky peaks are in the distance with nearer hills covered in green trees. A river winds it's way through the middle of the photo

I started mapping in June 2020 as a way to find parks and trails near my home in Redmond, Washington. My daughter loves adventures and provides huge motivation. I am a former compiler engineer and bring a passion for great tooling. I love being able to work with others on an expansive, vivid, and important project.

My mapping

A map of the North America  with a heatmap overlay. The heat map has high density across the entire lower 48 states with additional patches over Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and Alaska

Mapping continues to provide joy and satisfaction. I am astounded by the number of passionate, clever, and kind mappers that I have had the pleasure of collaborating with over the last two years. Most of my editing remains in the United States but who doesn’t love a little “vacation” every once in a while?

As a board member

OSM-US has achieved so much in the past two years that it’s difficult to list everything. More conferences, expanding working groups, even more hiring and fundraising.

It’s been an enormous pleasure to work with my fellow board members and our Executive Director to continue the upward trend of this amazing organization. I hope to continue that work.

I have learned so much over my two-year term but I remain committed to the principles in my original position statement:

Great organizing makes contributing easier and more engaging. The working group model continues to grow and pay dividends. It remains one of the best ways to identify, engage with, and solve some of our biggest issues. The Education Working Group will soon be able to roll out sandboxed instances of OSM so that our newest mappers can safely play and learn. Our newest working group is tackling pedestrian infrastructure and has been hugely successful at bringing together various parties to help us all move collectively forward.

I believe the most successful map is the one we ALL build together. I have continued to engage productively with folks across the OSM-US Slack, Mastodon, community board, Discord, etc. Over this time I was asked to be part of the moderation team for the OSM Mastodon instance and have taken on the “helper” role in the OSM Discord. We don’t all need to be in the same spaces to make great maps but it is often helpful in my role as board member to have an expansive view of the community, even those outside the US.

The map today is great but the map tomorrow will be even better. It can be intimidating and difficult to know what work “needs” to be done. There are a million things to do and lots of energy to do them. Over the past two years I have facilitated numerous efforts to help folks direct their energy.

Some projects I will be working on this coming year to achieve a better map:

Please reach out if you have questions/concerns/just want to chat, I love to collaborate with and support the goals of other mappers. Nothing is immovable when we all work together.

Discussion

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