Past and Future of the OSMF Membership Working Group
2019-09-21 , Großer Hörsaal

What is an OSMF working group, what does the membership working group in particular do, and how can you improve the experience of an OSMF membership.


The OSMF working groups are the main way in which the foundation supports OSM in specific areas. I am part of the membership working group since 2016. I will talk about working groups in general, what we do in the membership working group, and also talk about my experience in the latter. In the last year, we had quite a few new things going on like the fee-waiver program, we could improve our processes by using a support tracker and getting part of our procedures finally written down. And then there was the ever increasing wave of member sign ups before the elections, which this year raised the question of how we can protect the OSMF from being taken over by lots of new members from a particular interest group. There is still a lot of room for improvements of the experience for the OSMF members, and a few tasks that are still unresolved will be discussed in the last part of my presentation. And maybe you are interested in helping with one of them. We are all volunteers and it turns out some things need quite a bit of time and endurance to get done. We would be glad to get new participants to our group.


Talk keywords:

foundation, membership, working group, governance

See also: slides (133.1 KB)

Michael Spreng lives in Cham. He studied Computational Science and Engineering at ETH Zürich. He develops simulation software at a medium software company.

He noticed OpenStreetMap in 2009 and started mapping in his vicinity. He tries to map where ever he goes if he finds a few minutes to spare. He takes care of the SOSM servers, is on the membership working group and looks after the comparison with the official public transport list DIDOK.