On Jan 15, 2013, at 8:54 AM, Jaakko Helleranta.com wrote: > Hope to read something also from candidates. .. Please all candidates > remember that there are new (and quite possibly older) voting members (too) > who might not know you very well / what drives you / would drive you in HOT > board work.
Thanks for this, Jaakko. I hope that all of you have cast your votes already, but I'm happy to briefly talk about my hopes for HOT for the next year. Broadly, I remind you that we all see the role of HOT as taking three basic forms. One is providing surge capacity for remote mapping of humanitarian crises and crisis-prone parts of the world. The second is training locals in such places to map their own communities for disaster resilience and economic growth. The third is to develop technology, particularly software and web-based services, to support the first two goals. Over the next year, I would like to promote the following: 1) Better engagement of HOT volunteers in organizational decision making and policy setting. I hear frustration that worthy volunteers did not receive voting privileges this year. I remind you that this was in part because not enough people voted in the election. I think that the Board needs to take responsibility for this, and for promoting decision making by the membership. For example, what qualifies as a HOT project? Did the work that some of us did in crowdsourcing disaster assessment for FEMA via aerial photos after Hurricane Sandy qualify to be a HOT project? You should decide these questions, not the Board. 2) Establishing transparency of decision making. Coincident to this is the question Katrina raised of transparency. Transparency is a challenge for the Board not because we wish to deceive or obfuscate, but purely because communicating every decision to be made with the membership entails transaction costs in terms of volunteer time. This must be fixed. We need to overcome these costs, or simply bear them as a necessary part of working together in a volunteer organization. 3) Establishing staff accountability. We have begun, belatedly, to establish standards for reporting work done by staff on HOT projects. These standards need to be made firm and the reporting made visible to the membership. I look to this not as a lack of trust in our paid staff, but purely because we should be accountable to each other and to our funders for the money we spend as a non-profit. 4) Developing training capacity for project "in the field". Right now we have a dearth of trainers and project managers, and the result is that our staff is overstretched and the Team is having to consider turning down projects because we lack enough competent people to execute them. We need to develop and implement a plan to expand our training capacity. 5) Transitioning HOT technical infrastructure to a solid foundation. Right now HOT's technical services are scattered across a variety of hosting platforms, some of which are less stable and/or more expensive than we could wish them to be. We need to find dedicated web hosting, donated in kind, which allows us to run services like the Tasking Manager, image delivery, et cetera, in a sane and reliable fashion. 6) Rebooting the working groups. Particularly I would like to see the Activation Working Group reach the goal of articulating what "HOT activation" means and when it happens and why. 7) Establishing a code of conduct. I want to see a working group to draw up a code of conduct for HOT participants. I think this is self evident but it needs to happen. 8) Securing funding. HOT needs to secure reliable sources of non-profit funding to ensure continued operations. I think we hoped that this would be part of the role of the Executive Director, but it hasn't happened, mostly because of the capacity issue mentioned above. We might start a working group for this; alternately, we might also hire a development director and/or grant writer to commit to the search for funding. Anyway, it's a lot. Sometimes I despair of how much more time a HOT directorship takes up than I was promised it would. But this is a necessary part of the work we do and take pride in. Still, I don't think we'll accomplish a fraction of it without finding a way to involve each and every one of you more deeply in our efforts to map the world for the sake of people in need. SDE _______________________________________________ HOT mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/hot
