Annual General Meetings/2024/Chairperson’s report

Content copied from OSM diary entry.

Dear OpenStreetMap Community and fellow mappers,

After writing to you in 2022 and 2023, you could think that these chairman reports would become pretty routine: compare a few numbers over time, tout the accomplishments of the OSMF board this year, and give a few paths for the coming year. I will be doing this, but in contrast to previous years, we do not have many positive changes to report on, because of the way the board has been (not) working. I will expand on why later, and talk about how I think the board should refocus in 2025. What might sound like board internal politics is actually, I think, at the core of how we organise as a project. This hasn’t been an easy report to write, which is why it comes so late.

We have 2088 members today, down from 2161 in December 2023, compared with about 2000 in December 2022. 1125 members today are associated members, and the 2024 membership campaign led by Arnalie at least helped diversify our membership’s geographic diversity. The next board should budget for changes to the website to recognise membership, and encourage qualifying mappers to join for an associate membership. It should also rethink the current complex membership structure, and look at technical improvements to the membership system.

We were happy to welcome Regrid, QGIS and Calimoto as silver corporate members in 2024.

Our number of registered users went down to 9851706 from 10.5 million as OWG cleaned up thousands of spam accounts. The number of nodes, ways and relations in the database keeps increasing at a normal rate, showing our growth and demonstrating how contributing to OpenStreetMap is important to many.

We celebrated our 20th birthday this year! What started off as Steve Coast’s hopeless crazy idea is now at the core of so many maps around the globe. I lose track of all the places where I see OpenStreetMap. At first they laughed at us, then they fought us, and maybe now we are winning? There is an infinity of things left to map, and almost as many improvements to be done to the project itself, but it has become impossible to imagine a world without OpenStreetMap.

On the finance technical side, we have much improved our budgeting system, with expenses rapidly getting reconciled with the budget, and the board getting regular finance reports that take little effort to generate. This is work that took a long time: I started it back when I was treasurer. What sounds like a dry internal accounting system is actually useful for fundraising, to be able to accurately show where we’re spending donations. I would like to thank Harrison Devine in particular for his precious help in setting this up and with our 2024 budget.

Map attribution is not (just) an ego thing: giving credit where credit is due is important to recruit new mappers, which helps improve the map. Mateusz and I built a reporting system for maps using our own tiles without attribution, to make it easy to track, contact and, if all else fails, block them. In the coming year, I hope OWG can send back attribution warning images instead of 404 errors. Enforcement against OSM-based maps using tiles from other providers remains an issue that the board should help tackle.

Paul Norman’s vector tile project, which I announced at the AGM a year ago, is progressing nicely. We should have basic deployment to the website soon, and the next board should immediately fund the next part of the project, the development of a style and schema that showcases OpenStreetMap’s richness and diversity, and the many possibilities of vector tiles.

That’s pretty much it when it comes to big actions from the board this year that will have a significant impact on you. Compared to what previous boards were capable of doing, or what the stated intentions of board members hav been, it’s slim. If you look at our recent board agendas, they are pretty bare. Why is that?

The board is bigger than one person, it is the sum of seven humans working together. This year, the board hasn’t been working well at all, with the behaviour of some people leading to aggression, factionalism and frustration, leaving the uninvolved board members who had to act as Solomons burnt out too.

When we have done work this year, it has been on internal policies and guidelines. The additional red tape suffocates other work, and has lost track of what is necessary and good for the project; we had nine circular resolutions for travel costs for the face to face this year.

In May, I called for the board to get training on non-violent communication training. It is very unfortunate that this hasn’t happened, and that some board members refused to have one on one chats.

I hope that with a batch of new board members, the atmosphere on the board will change, and that we can work more collaboratively again.

People join the OSMF board because they have the project’s best interests at heart. How that translates into action is different for everyone; I have, in my five years on the board now, seen what works and doesn’t. You can’t work by yourself, or against board members, or order people to perform work for you, or even be critical of someone if you want to be able to work with them in the future. Some people come on the board thinking they’ll finally be able to implement their ideas, and tell people what to do. This never works. You have to gently convince six others that the direction you want to go in is a good use of the board’s time. The most powerful thing you can do as a board member is listen to problems and answer “how can I help?”

I would like to conclude by thanking everyone who contributes to OpenStreetMap, especially the working group volunteers.

Happy mapping,

Guillaume Rischard

Chairperson, OpenStreetMap Foundation