The 2026 Year of OSMF

Board Chairperson's Report

The Board is wrapping up the 2025/2026 Board year by reflecting on our activities and taking a look at what we got right and what we did wrong.

Accomplishments

In-person Meetings and Conferences

Our annual Face to Face meeting that was held in Madrid this year was a great success. The Board has these Face to Face meetings to build personal relationships and that's hard to do while discussing business on video and while coping with cultural differences and global time differences.

We must thank our Board secretariat Héctor and Dani, whose hard work of weighing different venues and the costs of various travel options resulted in us meeting in Madrid, in the offices of TomTom, one of our corporate members. As is by now almost a tradition, the two day meeting was facilitated by our awesome facilitator Allen Gunn, who led us through reviews of achievements and a revision of our strategies. A review of the working relationships between Board members is always part of the agenda and that helps to cement good working relationships.

See more on the blogpost: Highlights from the OSMF Board 2026 Face-to-Face Meeting

This Board has worked to be more engaged with the broader community, especially in person whenever possible, with regional and local State of the Map Conferences and other mapping-related and open community related convenings. We are limited by funding and the time volunteers can give, but we continue to work on building broad relationships with our broader community.

Good Governance

OSMF's move to Europe

We have reached a point in arranging our move from the UK to Europe where we have draft statutes of the new European OpenStreetMap entity that are now with the lawyers who are aligning them with Belgian law. We have asked for the new statutes to correspond with the UK Articles of Association as much as Belgian law will allow. Once they are approved by our lawyers the Board will make them available to members for a final review. Registration of a Belgian AISBL company will follow and then a long process of transferring assets and contracts from the UK entity to the EU entity.

We decided not to appoint the originally suggested UK firm Bird&Bird to assist in the move, mainly due to their premium cost structure. We found a small alternative firm in Leuven, Belgium which specialises in Non Governmental Organisations like OSMF, which has an NGO appropriate fee structure. See Impact Advocaten for more on that company. They have been good to work with.

We have a candidate accounting firm in Leuven, which we have not yet confirmed. Once we have set up a registered company and need to manage Belgian banking and tax returns the appointment of an accountant becomes important.

Documentation promotes transparency and teamwork (GitLab is great!)

The adoption of GitLab to organise our administration has been very successful. We now have persisting and searchable records of many threads of discussions which can be used later - like using it for preparing this report. We have created 1163 issues to date. We still have problems with following up on all the issues and there are many open issues which are abandoned while unresolved. A process for discovering and resolving these stuck issues is needed.

Good documentation promotes transparency and teamwork. All Board members now make it a habit to document their work which increases trust among each other. The Board works together, not as separate individuals, to advance OSMF goals and missions.

Important outgoing correspondence is shared with Board members on GitLab for a day or two before sending so that everyone is aware of the issue and can also make comments before sending. Napo deserves a special mention for the consistent quality of his comments on other members' outgoing emails.

Free Open Source Software and Open Data

The OSM Foundation supports free open source software. In alignment with that policy the board signed the Open Letter to Google Regarding Mandatory Developer Registration for Third-Party App Distribution ("Keep Android Open"). The letter and additional background information can be found at https://keepandroidopen.org/.

The Board commented on a proposal by the Overture Foundation proposing that the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Technical Committee should consider the Global Entity Reference System Framework as an OGC Community Standard. We were, in short, supportive of developing data interchange standards, but less supportive of any one proprietary standard being elevated to being "the" standard.

OSMF Membership

The Board continues to approve active contributor memberships for people who support the OSM movement with community organisations and other development work, but who do not do the minimum 42 days of mapping.

One problem we face is that the applications don't always clearly state the direct contribution of the actual individual (as opposed to promoting the work of the community they organise), which makes approval difficult. We need to improve the instructions to applicants.

The associate member scheme to give all members with more than 42 days mapping in the last 365 days the right to vote in the Board elections is working. The scheme could be used by far more mappers, but solving that problem will require better and consistent communication by the Board.

Working Groups

The Board is not directly involved in Working Groups, which is a feature of our decentralised governance, but we depend on their awesome work and we support them. We'd like to celebrate their wins through this report.

Operations Working Group

The Operations Working Group is a small team of very dedicated volunteers and Grant, who keep our systems running. Their major problem in the last year has been a very large increase in data scraping by people developing LLMs. They have defended our systems with various blocks and filters.

The Ops team also negotiated directly with QGIS to mitigate a big demand for tiles. QGIS does allow a local cache of tiles for each user which can mitigate later traffic, but the initial stocking of that cache is a massive demand for tiles which puts a lot of strain on our tile servers.

We have built a relationship with Wikimedia, who face very similar problems with LLM scraping, and Grant attended their recent conference in Brussels to reinforce that technical relationship.

Data Working Group

The Data Working Group is responsible for the integrity of OSM data, fighting errors and vandalism, which is an on-going battle. The Board is very grateful for their work.

The Board's main interactions with the DWG this year have been over the representation of international borders and the Canadian hiking trails issue.

Many countries and individuals write to OSMF every year to complain that our international borders don't match their particular legal definition. We typically respond that we use the "on-the-ground" rule, meaning that we place boundaries where administrative systems change, which is simple and readily verifiable. This is usually not acceptable to the writer and correspondence can get lengthy.

The Canadian hiking trail issue was that an off-road biker made a trail on public land which was mapped by one of our mappers. The creator wanted it to be private and not mapped so registered copyright on the trail and sent us a take-down notice. We disagreed and the creator sued. We are now in Canadian court over this matter.

Engineering Working Group

The Engineering Working Group continues its great work on developing and maintaining software solutions for the OSM systems.

Our main development project this year has been Minh's work with several contractors that is funded by the STF to do core system updates. The Board project manager for this is Héctor, who works closely with EWG.

The EWG approved 8 microgrants for engineering projects in late 2025. These have been funded and managed by EWG. Some issues with moving funds to project owners were dealt with.

Communications Working Group

The Communications Working Group has had a rough year. The Working Group collapsed earlier and has since been in a process of being revived under new management by Dani, who represents the Board and Mila who is volunteering as the WG Chair.

This reminds us that Working Groups, which are an essential part of our organisation, are built on human relationships and can be very fragile. They need conscious ongoing effort to keep members enthusiastic, comfortable and productive.

Membership Working Group

The big issue in the MWG has been the problems with CiviCRM, some of which problems have been addressed while other problems remain on the priority to-do list. The WG has been allocated funds and has appointed a consultant with specific CiviCRM expertise to begin to correct some of the long term problems. Grant has created a separate sandboxed copy of the CiviCRM system for development purposes as we do not want to do any development work on the production system. That work began recently and the consultant has been doing preliminary work like anonymising the database entries to set up the development database.

A special shoutout to the MWG Chairperson and leader, Michael Spreng, our admin Dorothea and Laura who oversees this project for the Board, for their dedication and tireless work to ensure our membership database is running smoothly and accurately.

Local Chapters and Communities Working Group

For 6 consecutive years now, LCCWG have been organizing the Local Chapters and Communities (LCC) Congress. The LCC Congress is a virtual event gathering OSM contributors and communities all over the world to share their stories and learn from each other. More information on the LCC Congress 2026 here.

Their participant survey on what is hard about being part of the OSM movement identified some stand-out problems. They were that documentation mostly in English, it is demotivating being 'yelled' at by expert mappers, forum discourse can be negative and there is such a lot to learn. This is a reminder for us all to keep working on these well known but persisting problems.

For some time the LCCWG has been working on an alternative membership model which simplifies becoming a Local Chapter. Creating a registered legal entity, typically a small company, has been a hurdle for new Local Chapters but is a precaution we set up to keep funds in collective not personal accounts. Weakening those controls for early stage LCs is desirable to allow the setting up an LC without too much up-front administrative work.

Legal Working Group

Legal WG continues to provide a valuable consultation service in support of our trickier administrative work, reviewing contracts and advising on intellectual property and copyright matters.

The LWG advised the Board to get local counsel in Canada to deal with the Biking Trail lawsuit, and that has been working well. That lawsuit involves a trail biker who registered copyright on a trail - described above.

State of the Map Working Group

The global State of the Map 2026 conference was held in Paris, France, and it was an outstanding success. There was strong attendance by especially European members and a very good selection of talks and papers.

Heartfelt thanks to the SotM Working Group, OSM France and the team of local volunteers who were responsible for the conference's success. The year marks the end of Christine Karch's years as Chair of the State of the Map Working Group. Christine started with SotM WG in 2016 and stepped down as leader of the WG this year. Thank you so much for all the work Christine! The role of Chairperson will now be taken up by Arnalie Vicario, a well-known and charismatic powerhouse in OSM community activism. The Board wishes Arnalie well in the new role.

The next SotM will take place in Bogota, Colombia. This is the second global SotM in South America after Buenos Aires, Argentina was the first in 2014 and we couldn't be more thrilled. South America has many active mapping communities and this is a great opportunity to meet them.

SotM Regional and Other conferences

We were not able to attend but instead prepared a video address featuring Board members for the SotM Kerala 2026. We sent Laura to represent the Board at the SotM Africa event in Tanzania. We voted on funds to sent Brazil Singh to the SotM India 2026 conference and we sent a short Board video to that conference. Héctor represented the Board at the GKI Summit at Geospatial World Forum in Amsterdam. Dani is to represent the Board at the Latin America SotM 2026 and has also been invited to represent OSMF at a Transportation panel at Harvard University. We tried, but failed, to get Brazil to a SotM conference in Japan. We have secured free entry to the Esri annual conference, which is enormous, but have not identified who will represent us.

Financials and Fundraising

Our financial systems have seen significant improvement with Roland submitting a well structured budget for approval this year. One big achievement has been Roland's success in automating generation of the draft budget. Preparing a budget is a lot of work, and automation has helped.

Our biggest issue in finances is probably transferring funds. There is still no one globally agreed manner to move funds to people in other countries. Even highly developed countries like Canada create problems. This is not something we can fix ourselves, but we are scanning options to try to find one capable contractor to do this for us.

For a while we have been locked out of some bank accounts. This was a huge admin problem, but Roland has corrected it and is still working on expanding the signatories to those accounts.

Income

The number of corporate members is growing slowly. We have been receiving unsolicited applications which Dorothea processes. Dani has been contacting known users of our data that are not yet corporate Members. We have begun a programme of meeting with our larger members to build contacts.

We have received major donations, which will each support OSM core operations and engineering in different ways.

The FLOSS fund granted us USD 30 000.

The grant from the German Government's Sovereign Tech Agency has been allocated to fund the OSMF Core Software Development Facilitator position for two years. These funds will be exhausted towards the end of 2026, and the current Board has committed OSMF internal funds to continuing the good work of the current contractors.

On 29 December 2025 we received 2 Bitcoin as an anonymous donation. The value was then around GBP 138 000. This big contribution has allowed us to increase internal funding to application development work. It triggered an ongoing project to define a policy and process on accepting anonymous donations. That document is currently in draft state. It also triggered us getting an account with a BTC broker. Previously we used Grant's personal account to deal with BTC donations which presented a lot of personal and taxation risk for him.

Diversity

The current Board is fairly diverse, with members spread across the globe, offering a wide set of skills, speaking six different first languages, having varied skin tones, a spectrum of ages, and bringing complementary interests to the table. This term we had only two women on the team, down from three in a previous Board, and in the upcoming year we will only have one woman, which is disappointing.

We hope that this review and our awareness of the need for diversity will encourage a range of members to stand for a position on the board. Our strong board rules on supportive behaviour underlie our work to build a culture of keeping our members feel included and safe from aggressive acts.

New Hiring

We have two full-time posts in the pipeline. The Executive Director and the second System Operator. Both have been described and defined, and are currently ready to go at the pre-advertising stage.

The Executive Director is being given second priority in the hiring pipeline. The post is seen as strongly biased towards fundraising and Board members, especially Dani, supported by Craig, are currently covering this need.

Our assessment is that the post we need most urgently is support for the Operations team in the form of a second systems operator. This will be a full-time job as a salaried (or contracted) colleague for Grant. This will address the high risk situation we face that Grant could resign or be incapacitated at any time and we will not have any reserve capacity to continue his work, placing an unacceptable and possibly unsustainable burden on the voluntary OPS members.

The Back Room

The Board must thank Dorothea for her ongoing and hard work keeping our admin systems going. Dorothea has a finger in every pie and makes sure everything stays on track. Dorothea is a strength to the organisation.

We'd also like to thank Michelle, our bookkeeper, who has had a very trying year fighting with our banks (and other people's banks) while dealing with demanding personal issues. Michelle is hidden from the membership but her work is essential to our operations.

In conclusion

The last year has been very productive, although difficult, in developing the organisation, the finances and governance. The OSM Foundation is stronger for our year as Board members, and we hope that it will continue with the new set of Board Members.

Prepared on behalf of the Board by:

Craig Allan
Chair of the 2026 OSMF Board