Board Member Bios
We have a small team of board members of the foundation. Here is a bit about each of them, including declarations of any other directorships and any substantial shareholdings.
- Board members are volunteers and are usually1 not getting paid by the OSM Foundation for the work they do.
- All board members are "directors" in the sense of the UK Companies Act. Even the person we designate "secretary" is not a "secretary" in the sense of the UK Companies Act.
- See the OSM Foundation board members by year on the OSM wiki.
Current Board
Craig Allan
Craig came out of a local government background, where as a spatial planner he received formal training in aerial photo interpretation, photogrammetry and land survey. He has used commercial GIS systems since the 80’s, starting on the simple but very effective Atlas GIS by Strategic Mapping Inc. and later moving on to the infuriating but effective ARC/INFO by ESRI. Now he's a QGIS fan and has used it supporting philanthropic work in Rangpur Division, Bangladesh.
Craig concentrates on mapping in Africa. He appreciates that putting a village on the map may enable residents to be recognised and to receive development support and humanitarian aid. Craig is also very interested in conservation and climate change, so does a lot of mapping of threatened forests of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and in several places in Kenya, such as the Mara reserve and forests and wetlands inland of Lamu town. He also maps in north Chad because he's interested in both rock arches and the East Saharan montane xeric woodland which somehow survives on high mountains in the Sahara.
In his later working life he did less geography and demographics and turned to management doing Strategic planning, Risk management, Performance management, Budgeting and administrative tasks. Those have their uses for building and managing organisations, and he now deploys those skills in the interest of the OSMF and the broader OSM community.
Daniela (Dani) Waltersdorfer Jimenez
Daniela Waltersdorfer, also known as Dani is from Lima, Peru, and also spent part of her childhood in Bogota, Colombia, and in a suburb of Miami in the U.S. After other moves and adventures, she now resides in Washington, D.C. , U.S. As a professional, she works in the Transportation Industry, where she helps many transportation agencies with their transit, logistics, supply-chain, and asset management needs in the form of digital geospatial solutions. She’s a big advocate for proper accessibility and mobility for people and goods. She’s been a leader of Maptime Boston and Maptime Miami, where (along with her awesome co-leads) provided GIS and mapping education to the local communities, led mapathons, and hosted a space for everything map-related in our urban areas.
Her first edit on OSM was for a HOTOSM task in Nepal. This is when she learned about the OSM project and community. Dani was fascinated by the involvement and logistics of the OSM community; there were people from all over the world, people who will probably never meet in person, who are also working on this task to help the people in Nepal and the humanitarian organizations sending relief. “I remember telling my grandfather about OSM and sharing this amazing idea of a community working together to complete the map. He was a pilot in the Peruvian Air Force who spent a lot of time surveying and mapping the Amazon Region in Peru, so he certainly understood my fascination”.
Dani is a volunteer-mapper and is passionate about growing the OSM communities. Feel free to contact her whenever! She is fluent in English and Spanish.
Loves: Family, friends, dogs, beaches, long walks, Pilates, trains.
Hates: Snails, smog, pollen, misogyny.
Guillaume Rischard
Guillaume Rischard from Luxembourg maps as Stereo, which is easier to pronounce. When he discovered OpenStreetMap in 2008, there were only a few main roads displayed around him. He didn’t take the project seriously. In 2011, he ran into it again, and saw that the map had become a lot more detailed. He spotted a missing name, and when he saw it displayed on the map when he refreshed right after saving it, he was hooked. When he uploads a changeset, he still likes to open that place in his browser while it still hasn’t rendered, open the same URL in a new tab a few seconds later, then switch between the tabs.
He works as a freelance data consultant, and was the technical lead and helped drive strategy on the Luxembourg Open Data Portal, where one success was getting the addresses, orthoimagery and official map data of Luxembourg released.
The most significant thing he’s written recently is probably the Membership Working Group report on the 100 suspicious signups. Guillaume and his co-author Steve Friedl were honoured to receive the OpenStreetMap award for influential writing for it at the State of the Map conference in Heidelberg.
He is a member of the Data Working Group and Membership Working Group, and occasionally contributes to the OSM Weekly.
Héctor Ochoa Ortiz
Pending.
Laura Mugeha
Pending.
Maurizio Napolitano
Maurizio Napolitano (also known as "napo") is from Italy. Despite a sociology background, he is a researcher in computer science at the Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK) in Trento, where he leads the Digital Commons Lab. His work focuses on open data, open-source software, and AI ethics, with an emphasis on promoting digital commons like OpenStreetMap (OSM).
An activist in the open-source movement for over 25 years, Maurizio has contributed to OpenStreetMap through scientific research, organization of conferences, public speaking (including three TEDx talks), and the creation of the Italian OSM Chapter within Wikimedia Italia. He teaches Geospatial Analysis in the Master in Data Science program at the University of Trento and is also actively engaged as a volleyball coach.
Working at Fondazione Bruno Kessler and leading the Digital Commons Lab unit.
Roland Olbricht
Roland Olbricht came to OSM in 2008. Since 2011 he maintains and operates the Overpass API independent of this daytime job. Before Covid, he has been participant of multiple local meet-ups. He makes software for public transit as a software developer for the company MENTZ GmbH.
1 Exception: 2021/resolution 19, tied to the task of resolving the blockage of PayPal and TransferWise accounts at that point.