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Communication Working Group/Volunteer Manual

From OpenStreetMap Foundation

Notice

This manual is under development. Content is being added progressively. Last updated: June 2026. Questions and corrections: communication@osmfoundation.org

About this manual

This manual is written for new members joining the Communications Working Group, and for returning members picking up after the 2026 restart. It covers the practical reality of how the group works from day to day: what you will actually be doing, how the group makes decisions, how to get access to the tools you need, and where to turn when you are not sure what to do next.

It does not replace the CWG's formal policy documents. The Conflict of Interest Policy and the Affiliations List have their own pages, both linked in Section 9, and where this manual and a policy document say different things the policy document takes precedence.

If you find something here that is missing, out of date, or simply wrong, please edit it. That is what a wiki is for.

1. What the CWG is and why it matters

The Communications Working Group is one of several working groups authorised by the OSMF Board to carry out specific tasks on behalf of the Foundation, and its task is communication: telling the story of OpenStreetMap and the OSMF to the world, and making sure that the extraordinary diversity of the OSM community is faithfully represented in that story.

OpenStreetMap is one of the most significant open-source projects on earth, and yet hundreds of millions of people use OSM data every day without knowing it. The gap between what this project actually is and what most people understand it to be is large, and the CWG exists in part to close that gap. When a journalist asks what OSM is, when a government agency wants to know who made the map they are using, when a new contributor is trying to understand what the Foundation does and why it matters, the CWG is the voice that answers.

The CWG is independent. It works closely with the Board and coordinates with other working groups, but it is not a sub-committee of the Board and does not report to it. Content decisions are the CWG's own to make. Where a piece of content would commit the Foundation to a formal public position on a sensitive or contested matter, the group coordinates with the Board before publication, but this is a matter of good practice and good sense rather than of hierarchy or obligation.

The CWG is not a policy-making body, which is the Board's role, and it is not a technical body, which is the role of the Operations and Engineering Working Groups. It is the group that takes what is happening across the project and finds ways to communicate it clearly, honestly, and engagingly to the people who need to hear it.

A note on the 2026 restart. The CWG went through a period of reduced activity before being identified at the June 2026 Madrid board meeting as a priority for revival. If you are reading this as a new or returning member, you are part of that restart, and some of the processes described in this manual are still being re-established. If you find something that does not work as described, please flag it at the next weekly meeting or open a GitLab ticket rather than simply working around it.

2. What we do — the five content pillars

Everything the CWG publishes falls into one of five content pillars, though the pillars are not rigid categories and a single piece of content will often serve more than one. Their purpose is to guide decisions about what to prioritise and how to keep the output balanced over time, with a rough target of fifteen to twenty-five percent of posts from each pillar measured over any six-month period.

Pillar 1: Important information about the OSM project. This covers infrastructure news, technical projects, service outages, and significant data developments. Most of this content originates with the Operations Working Group or OSMF staff rather than with the CWG itself, and your role will often be to edit it for a general audience and ensure it reaches the right channels promptly. A post about a major server upgrade or a change to the tile rendering pipeline is a typical example.

Pillar 2: Diverse stories of the OSM community. This is the heart of the CWG's original content work and the pillar where the group has the most creative latitude. Mapper of the Month profiles, coverage of local and regional SotM events, humanitarian mapping stories, community project features: anything that puts a human face on the people who are actually building the map. Representing underrepresented regions and voices is an explicit priority here, not an afterthought.

Pillar 3: OSMF Board communications. Board elections, strategic planning updates, major governance decisions, and transparency reporting. The Board generates most of this content, and the CWG's role is to shape how it is presented, ensure it reaches the right channels, and sometimes draft or edit on the Board's behalf.

Pillar 4: Fundraising support. Social media campaigns, improvements to donation pages, and communications to and about corporate members. The CWG works alongside the Fundraising Committee on this pillar. You will not be expected to lead fundraising strategy, but you may well be asked to write campaign copy, draft social posts, or help refine messaging.

Pillar 5: Corporate member communications. Announcements of new corporate members, updates on corporate contributions, and communications that support the Advisory Board's relationship with corporate sponsors. This pillar overlaps naturally with Pillar 4 and is coordinated closely with the Advisory Board coordinator and the Board itself.

3. The channels we manage

The OSM Blog (blog.openstreetmap.org) is the CWG's primary publication and carries the official voice of the Foundation. Posts are substantive, typically somewhere between three hundred and eight hundred words, and are translated into multiple languages by the OSM translation volunteer community before or shortly after publication. The blog is permanent and indexed, and it carries considerably more weight than anything published on social media, so it deserves proportionally more care. A blog post that is wrong or poorly worded is a great deal harder to correct than a social media post.

Mastodon (@openstreetmap@en.osm.town) is the CWG's preferred federated social channel. The OSM community is genuinely active on Mastodon and engagement there tends to be real and substantive. Tone can be slightly warmer and more conversational than the blog allows.

X / Twitter (@OpenStreetMap) remains a significant channel for reach. The CWG maintains a presence here because a substantial portion of OSM's external audience, including journalists, developers, and institutional partners, still uses it, and content is largely mirrored across X and Mastodon.

Facebook (facebook.com/OpenStreetMap) reaches a somewhat different audience: more casual users, local mapping communities, and people who are less likely to be on the other platforms. Content that works well here tends to be visual and accessible rather than technical.

Instagram (@openstreetmap) is the most visual of the channels the CWG manages. Maps, imagery, community photos, and short-form content all perform well, and if you have an eye for visual content this is the channel that most rewards that kind of attention.

LinkedIn (OSM group) reaches a professional and institutional audience including potential corporate members, government contacts, academic researchers, and journalists. The tone here should be more formal than on other channels, and new corporate membership announcements and Board-level communications tend to land particularly well.

Amplification. A significant part of the CWG's work is amplifying content from the broader OSM community that aligns with the content pillars, by liking, reposting, and sharing content from local chapters, individual mappers, partner organisations, and other working groups. You do not need to produce original content to make a meaningful contribution through amplification, and WeeklyOSM, the OSM community Mastodon, and the OSM diaries are all good sources of material worth sharing.

Channels we do not manage. WeeklyOSM is an independent community project. Local chapter social media accounts are managed by the chapters themselves. OSM diaries are individual contributors' own spaces. Please do not post to any of these on behalf of the CWG without an explicit arrangement already in place.

4. How a piece of content gets made

This section will describe the end-to-end content workflow: how story ideas come in, the GitLab ticketing process, who writes, edits, approves and publishes, turnaround expectations, and the translation process. It requires input from the group Chair before it can be drafted accurately, and is marked here as a gap to be filled once the group has established its working practices.

5. Rules we work by

Content must be authentic. AI tools may be used to assist with research, drafting, or editing, but the final product must be genuinely crafted by a CWG writer and must represent their own thinking and voice. The OSM community holds authenticity and human authorship in high regard, and the CWG's credibility depends on earning and maintaining that regard. If you are unsure whether your use of a particular tool is consistent with this principle, raise it with the group before publishing rather than after.

Post consistently. The group aims for at least one social media post per week and at least one blog post per month, and these are minimums rather than targets. Consistency matters more than volume because a reliable cadence is what builds an audience's trust over time. If you find yourself unable to cover posts you have committed to, please flag this to the group in advance so that someone else can step in.

Ask working groups for content. The CWG does not need to generate all of its own story ideas. Every working group is a potential source, and building a relationship with a contact in each WG and asking them periodically what they are working on that might be worth sharing is one of the most valuable things a CWG member can do. The same applies to local chapters and regional communities.

Attribute photos correctly. Every photograph published on the blog or on social media needs a clear and accurate attribution. Check the licence before using any image, seek explicit permission when using photos from OSM diaries or community events, and add alt text to every image both as an accessibility requirement and as good practice in its own right.

Get permission before quoting. If you want to quote from an OSM diary entry, a community forum post, or any writing that is not formally published under an open licence, please ask the author first. A brief message is all it takes, and if you cannot reach the author then paraphrase rather than quote directly.

Be transparent about affiliations. If a piece of content you are working on relates directly to an organisation you are affiliated with, say so to the group before volunteering to write or publish it. The conflict of interest process described in Section 9 exists precisely for this situation and is straightforward to follow.

Follow the open-source software preference. Where possible, please use open-source tools for CWG work. This is not always possible in practice, and the group currently uses Buffer for crossposting and Canva for graphic design, neither of which is open source, but the preference should inform your choices whenever a genuine alternative exists.

6. How we work together

Weekly meeting. The CWG meets every Thursday from 17:00 to 18:00 UTC on BigBlueButton at https://osmvideo.cloud68.co/user/dor-mt1-8ei-26t. Meetings are open and anyone from the wider OSM community is welcome to observe. The group aims for consensus on decisions and escalates to a formal vote only when consensus cannot be reached.

IRC. The CWG channel on the OFTC IRC network is #osm-cwg, accessible via webchat at https://webchat.oftc.net/?channels=#osm-cwg. This channel is functional but has been superceded by the CWG Matrix chat room.

GitLab. Day-to-day content work is tracked in the CWG GitLab repository, where story ideas, drafts, translation requests, and press enquiries are all managed as tickets. Section 8 describes how to get access.

Chair. The group is led by a Chair who convenes the weekly meeting, holds editorial oversight, and is the first point of contact for new members and external enquiries.

Board liaisons. Dani Waltersdorfer Jimenez and Brazil Singh are the OSMF Board's liaisons to the CWG. They attend CWG meetings where possible, keep the group informed of newsworthy developments from across the working groups and Board business, and carry CWG concerns back to the Board when needed. If something comes to you through a Board liaison that might be worth covering, raise it at the next weekly meeting or open a GitLab ticket.

Other liaison roles. Liaison roles connecting the CWG to the SotM Working Group, the Fundraising Committee, and the Advisory Board are appointed from within the group membership. If you have relevant experience or connections in any of these areas, please let the Chair know.

How decisions are made. Most content decisions, including what to publish, which angle to take, and which channels to prioritise, are made by whoever is working on a piece, with the weekly meeting serving as a sounding board. Decisions that would commit the Foundation to a public position on a sensitive matter are raised with the Board liaisons before publication.

7. Roles and responsibilities

This section will describe the Chair role, general member responsibilities, liaison roles, and arrangements for cover when someone is unavailable. It will be drafted once the group has constituted itself and roles have been agreed.

8. Getting access to things

This section will cover how access is granted and managed for social media accounts, GitLab, BigBlueButton, Canva, and Buffer. It requires input from the group Chair before it can be drafted accurately.

9. Conflict of interest and affiliations

OpenStreetMap attracts contributors from a wide range of companies, organisations, and community groups, many of which have a commercial or institutional interest in how OSM is represented publicly. The CWG sits at a point where those interests could, if left unmanaged, distort what gets published and whose stories get amplified. The group manages this through two mechanisms that work together: an affiliations list and a conflict of interest policy.

The affiliations list. When you join the CWG you declare your affiliations, meaning the OSM-related communities, companies, and organisations you are part of, and you keep that declaration updated as your affiliations change. The list is public and lives at the CWG Affiliations List. Your affiliations are not a barrier to joining and are not a judgement about your suitability; they are information the group uses to ensure that no single organisation ends up with a majority voice within the CWG.

The conflict of interest policy. If a piece of content you are working on relates directly to an organisation you are affiliated with, you should declare that conflict to the group before proceeding, either by mentioning it at the weekly meeting or by noting it on the GitLab ticket for that piece of content. Another member will then take the editorial lead. You can still contribute background research or information, but the decisions about what to publish and how to frame it should rest with someone who does not have a conflict.

When you are not sure. If you are genuinely unsure whether something constitutes a conflict of interest, raise it with the Chair rather than making the call alone. Erring on the side of transparency is always the right approach, and no one will think less of you for asking.

10. Joining and leaving

Joining. To join the CWG, send an email to communication@osmfoundation.org with three things: your name or OSM username; a note on your affiliations, meaning the OSM-related communities, groups, or companies you are currently part of; and a brief description of why you would like to join and what kinds of things you would like to do. The description does not need to be extensive and this is not a job application. Current members then have one week to discuss your request, after which they will come back to you with a decision that is based on your affiliations and the current composition of the group rather than on any assessment of your abilities. If you are not accepted at a particular moment it is almost certainly a matter of affiliations balance rather than any reflection on you personally, and you are welcome to ask the Chair for more context.

Once you are accepted, you will be added to the CWG GitLab, invited to the weekly meeting, and given access to the tools described in Section 8.

Taking a leave of absence. If you need to step back temporarily, please let the Chair know. There is no formal minimum activity requirement, but the group works better when it knows who is available and when, and if you expect to be away for more than a month it is worth mentioning this at a weekly meeting and ensuring that any content you have committed to is handed over to someone else.

Leaving. When you leave the CWG, the Chair will arrange for your access to the shared social media accounts, GitLab, and other tools to be removed. Please update your entry on the affiliations list before you go and let the Chair know whether any ongoing pieces of content need to be handed over. Former members are acknowledged on the main CWG page, and leaving when the time is right is a normal and appreciated part of how a volunteer group sustains itself.

11. Useful links

CWG pages

OSM channels

Tools

Community sources for story ideas

  • OSM Community Forum — the main Discourse instance; covers mapping, software, governance, and community topics across dozens of regional and thematic categories
  • Mailing lists — the older but still active email lists including talk@, osmf-talk@, and numerous regional lists
  • WeeklyOSM — community-produced weekly digest in multiple languages; an excellent index of what has been happening across the project
  • OSM Diaries — individual contributor blogs; a source of personal stories and project updates that often make good Pillar 2 material
  • OSM on Mastodon — active federated community; useful for picking up emerging conversations before they reach the blog or forum
  • Press Portal — overview of OSM in the media; useful context for press enquiries
  • Matrix — the CWG uses a Matrix room for real-time coordination between meetings. Access details are shared with members on joining.


Contact

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