I considered not running for the board because of the low number of edits
that I've done, but ultimately decided that I have a lot to contribute to
OSM in other ways. It is anyone's prerogative to not vote for someone while
taking edits into account, but I want to explain why I decided to run
despite my low number of edits.
I recently moved back to the U.S. after living in Bogota, Colombia, for the
last four years. While living there, I used OSM data regularly in my job as
a cartographer at an NGO and ran OSM workshops for local university
students. I just moved to Madison, Wisconsin, where I am starting up a
Maptime http://maptime.io/about chapter and plan to do an introduction to
OSM as our first session. I have been wanting to get more involved with
OSM, and I realized that I could put my community outreach and organizing
to use by running for the board.
As I and many other nominees stated, it's important to get new people
involved. But editing OSM can be quite intimidating to a new person, and I
would make it a priority to improve the on-ramp. I also think that we
should take advantage of existing learning networks, like universities, to
spread awareness of OSM and recruit more contributors. I know that these
are ambitious goals, and they may take more than a year, but those would be
my priorities on the board.
I don't think it would be wise for the OSM U.S. board to be comprised
entirely of inexperienced mappers, but I think it could benefit from having
someone on board who brings a fresh perspective and could even be
considered an outsider. The future success of OSM, after all, depends on
bringing more outsiders into the fold. Also, I did not make the decision to
run for board lightly. I recognize that it would be a serious time and
energy commitment, but serving on the board would take advantage of my
strengths to give back to an organization that I deeply believe in.
I'm happy to talk with anyone, so please feel free to reach out to me via
email or Twitter https://twitter.com/tolomaps.
Saludos,
Robin
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