Welcome back. Is everyone having a great conference? Yes. How about the event at the Mill City last night? The flower tower of power? I mean, like the best museum ride I've ever been on.

I don't know about all of you, but I feel really lucky to be here in Minneapolis. With that, I'd like to start by thanking our organizers. There's a long list, but it starts with our fearless leader, Eric Westra. Our program committee, our scholarship committee,

sponsor committee, logistical support here in Minneapolis, volunteers, photographers, catering staff, childcare, the captioning and AV team, and of course, the McNamara Center staff.

Please give them all a hand. Thank you so much for your hard work. I'd also like to recognize our scholars. Where are they this year? Alright. This year we're excited to welcome 25 scholars to the conference.

We have scholars from seven states and six countries, including Guinea, France, Uganda, Costa Rica, Israel, and Nigeria. So let's give them a hand. We didn't do this yesterday, but how many of you are attending your first State of the Map US?

Can I get a show of hands? That is amazing. Can you keep them up high? Look at that. Welcome. I have to say, I think that's one of the strongest responses I've seen on that question.

So welcome, and I really hope you all come back next year. So over the next ten minutes or so, depending on how fast I speak and how nervous I am, I'm going to talk about not only where we are standing today, I'm going to share some ideas for the future, but also how I hope we can all work together to realize

that future. Your input is integral. And at the end of my talk, you're all going to be invited to participate in a conversation about where we can go. We're going to ask for your feedback, your questions, and your ideas. So as I'm talking, start thinking about anything you'd like to ask or say to the entire room.

As Ian mentioned yesterday, it is a milestone year for OpenStreetMap Project. 15 years. And I know many of you in this room, and watching this video in like two years or something, have been part of this project since

the beginning. And I'm pretty sure we've scaled beyond our founders' wireless streams. OpenStreetMap has one million edits a day. I just learned that from Jennings and Seth yesterday. We are curating the only publicly available worldwide geospatial

database. And at the same time, doing a lot of innovative, creative, and important things with that data. Everybody can pat themselves on the back for that. So many people have contributed their time, their energy, passion, to help bring the map and the community where we are today.

Thank you. OpenStreetMap US and I would not be standing here in this role without all of your efforts. You want to give him a hand? It's late in the day.

We have to keep moving, right? We're going to get too tired. So people have asked me, like, what's it like here as an executive director? So I'm going to share a little about that. I have to say the first few months have been quite a ride. As a former board member, a member of the Teach OSM steering committee, I'm not a stranger to OpenStreetMap. So when I

stepped into the role, I thought, yeah, I kind of have an idea of what this could entail. Yeah. No. Over the last five months, I've learned how much more there is to know about this OpenStreetMap ecosystem. If you haven't figured it out yet, we're really big. And that's the beautiful

thing about OpenStreetMap. It's the number of opportunities that come along with this free open source database and this expansive, wonderful open community. I paired that with the overwhelming thing about this OpenStreetMap. It's the abundance of opportunities and all the

wonderful people who make this open community. As you probably know, we have no shortage of ideas. And as I mentioned yesterday, in this role, I want to hear from all of you. Over the past few months, I have been listening and learning. Many people have already generously shared their time with me. And even over the last two days, I have had the opportunity to

meet and talk with many of you in this room. I've learned a lot. I've also been asked a lot of questions. I'll give you a few examples of the last few months. A few weeks ago, I got a message on Slack from a mapper in Florida. She wanted to talk about her work in conservation using OpenStreetMap and offered to contribute a blog post.

Through our conversations, I learned she didn't know any other mappers in her area. I started thinking, how do we connect her? How do we help this person who is spending her time improving the map and advocating for the project? How does she feel like a part of the global community? And yet, she's

working down there in a silo. I received an email a few months back from a mapper in Pittsburgh. Miles, are you here? He reached out to me to ask how can he start to build a local community in Pittsburgh around OpenStreetMap. It's a wonderful question.

And just yesterday, Albert from San Francisco, Albert, are you in the room? I hope you're still here, came up to me and asked how can I participate in OpenStreetMap and support the community beyond mapping? I believe OpenStreetMap US is here to facilitate

that how. We are here to be part of the how. How do we better connect the 500 people in the US that map every single day? How do we support local communities? How do we retain our new mappers? How do we improve our diversity? How can we communicate better? I want to see the OpenStreetMap community in the US grow and

thrive. In practice, this means more members, more mappers, higher attendance at State of the Map US, and more local events. We need to build partnerships and strengthen collaborations with government, with educators, and with adjacent communities.

I think we can find ways to better support our community groups, make it easier to organize, to communicate, to learn how to edit, to validate, and to have a mapathon. But I'm not up here to answer all of those questions. I think this progress requires all of us in this room and watching today.

But I can say that OpenStreetMap US is here to support and facilitate your efforts. We are here to advocate for OpenStreetMap and help connect the dots in this massive network. I'd like to streamline our communications and make it easier to navigate and plug into our incredible ecosystem.

I'd like to grow and diversify our membership. We currently have 268 members. How many people in the room are members? Did you even know that you could be a member? We could double that number today, but I also want to make sure

that you see the benefits of your membership. What programs are we running? How are we supporting your local groups? I have a few actions in mind, but like I said, this is still a listening and learning and hearing all of your input as well kind of phase. But I'd like to start a few committees and create places for volunteers to support OpenStreetMap in new ways.

We have all experienced the work that the State of the Map US committee can accomplish. It's incredible, right? It's a pretty good conference. Imagine if we had a few committees focusing volunteer efforts on our communications, supporting these local groups, welcoming new people, and helping to organize all over the country.

We can make an incredible impact. I would also like to increase the visibility of both the organization and the map. At 15, we are a mature movement, but we are not as visible as we should be. OpenStreetMap is kind of

still a pretty well kept secret in many places. And I see it as part of my role to advocate for OpenStreetMap in the US. I want to understand why people are not yet part of the OpenStreetMap community. I want to allocate resources to outreach, education, and activism. How many people in this room has tried to explain OpenStreetMap to

your friends or to your family? How does that go over? I want to help make that easier. OpenStreetMap US was founded to facilitate the State of the Map US. In nine years as an organization, our ambitions have

grown. We want to have programs, hold events, help build tools, and provide support and direction for people new to the map. All of this will take time, collaboration, and resources. It's an exciting time to be part of OpenStreetMap, and there's so much for us to do. I invite all of you,

this is where I ask you to do things, I invite all of you to tell someone about OpenStreetMap. Join a new committee, meet up with other mappers in your town, run for the board in February, teach someone new to map, and I challenge you to stay in touch with everyone you've met after this conference. It's going to take all of us,

but I believe we can navigate the rest of our teenage years with grace. I'm grateful to be in this position, in all of this community, and so excited to see what we can accomplish. Thank you.

I'm not going to take any questions yet, so please hold those in your mind. Next, I would like to take some time to hear from all of you, but to help lead this conversation, I would like to invite the wonderful OpenStreetMapUS board up to join me. Andes, Joan Atkins, Steven Johnson,

Minh Nguyen, and Alyssa Wright. You want to come on up? Thank you. Where's the clicker? There it is.

How's everybody doing? Good. I like it. So we're going to talk a little bit about the state of the states. We're going to start with some hard numbers first. These are just some unofficial

but accurate counts of the some interesting pieces of OpenStreetMap data by state in OpenStreetMap. So this is just a regular old count of OpenStreetMap data

per state. I don't think this is by per capita, right? Jennings helped us with these, and I am pretty sure that these are just total.

Yes, it says total right there. There are some of these that are per capita. That's why I'm confused. So this is basically a map of population, you might notice. But there's plenty of places like Wisconsin and Illinois that aren't necessarily super popular or populous that have lots of total objects in OpenStreetMap. You might also notice

that there's a lot of green over on the right on the East Coast. That doesn't necessarily align with what you might think of the population, meaning that there's more OpenStreetMap data in the states over on the East Coast. There's more people, but maybe that means there's more OpenStreetMap community there.

So this is also a similar map, but just for highways, not for all of OpenStreetMap data. Texas, it's a big state. It also has a lot of roads. An interesting thing to me is Nevada, where there are a lot of tiger roads that might not actually be

roads. This would be a great place to spend time looking around for tiger cleanup. This is normalized by the area of the state. And so this indicates that there's more mappers, more mapper activity over on the East Coast.

And so if you see your state up here, and it's not green, that indicates that you might want to spend a little bit more time looking at highways. Or you could work on that part of OpenStreetMap with your community.

This is not adjusted to population, but it's the total number of buildings. And so you can see that California is way up there. Lots of buildings traced in California. But similar to what we saw before with total number of objects. Wisconsin and Illinois are pretty high up there.

And that doesn't necessarily follow with population. That's interesting. You didn't just go color blind. That's what I thought when I saw this. This is buildings but adjusted per capita. And I thought it was kind of interesting that North Dakota lit up there.

There aren't a whole lot of people in North Dakota, but there's a lot of buildings mapped. And one other interesting thing about this one is that Illinois, although I imported all the buildings in Chicago like 10 years ago, it's still not up there in terms of the number of buildings per capita. There's a whole lot of

Illinois that is not mapped outside of Chicago. Addresses, one of my favorite things in OpenStreetMap. Wisconsin, our friendly neighbors to the east here in Minnesota, have a very limited number of addresses.

Good job, Minnesota. Addresses. And then we get into the really important data. Laundromats. Notice Alaska representing on laundromats. Good job, Alaska. And then same thing with dry cleaners. For some reason the Pacific Northwest really shines here

on ice cream. This one is really surprising to me. Wisconsin should be number one. Why isn't it Wisconsin number one? Come on. I can't see the numbers, but they should at least be beating

California. There's a dairy rivalry. Sorry if that context isn't there. Next we're going to run through some feedback that we got when we reached out to the folks in these states. I think we will be talking to you in a moment, but we also want to

highlight some things that we heard from people in particular. Thank you. Hi everyone. As Maggie indicated earlier in the presentation, it's imperative

as the leadership of the organization's board and executive director that we're responsive to your needs and that we're actually listening to you. So during the conference Maggie collected a few quotes and we wanted to share a few of those with you so that we could kind of stimulate a bit of discussion coming up. We want to open up the floor as we go through

the presentation here and have it be a little bit more conversational as we go through. So we have a series of quotes here. Scott shared that anything that could be used to aid in mapping people use OSM solutions over Google Maps in Phoenix Metro. This is prominently a lack of residential building outlines and addresses.

And I like this particular sentence. Next, street complete is also really easy. That even mapping street material types et cetera triggers the dopamine. And I like the dopamine as a motivator for mapping. I think that's appropriate here. Diane shared that here is an

OSM in the wild story. I do volunteer. Ski Patrol. Isn't that a great application for OpenStreetMap? And I was happy to discover that Car Patrol uses the OSM base map for their mountain operations when they're locating issues that need to be addressed. I told one of the head guys that they could be an OSM editor and correct anything that they felt needed fixing in the map. I love that.

Also check out OSM snow map dot org which I love. I think there's a great confederation of OpenX maps around here. OpenDroneMap, OpenHistoricalMap, OpenRailwayMap and now we have OpenSnowMap so I wasn't even aware of that. Happy to get this one.

Lavente has shared that someone tagged Miami Beach as a beach. That was pretty funny. I was hoping to find a huge natural beach but unfortunately it's still a city surrounded by water and I verified it in the field. Love it. Florida has a very small and dispersed community. So what can we do about that Floridians? More like a collection

of individuals mapping on their own. So we're in silos here. Tried activation through the community imports with little luck. So we have some work to do there. Min, do you share this? I guess I can quote myself, sure. I'm living here by the way. No, volunteers

imported 295,000 buildings with addresses in Cincinnati and Hamilton County increasing the number of buildings more than five fold and that's I think the team is something like five or six dozen people. Something like that. Alex has shared that I haven't found much

of any organized mapping community in Maine. Same with Florida. I'm working with someone toward an import of E91 addresses and road just might be six months out. We're currently evaluating the quality of the data source. I'm working with someone else to expand the OSM tool set in C Sharp. We're about to release version one of a C Sharp client for the OpenStreetMap API.

I'm working on a tool to streamline automated edits that may never get used. So sad. To get familiar with OSM, I manually mapped a very small town, Limestone in northern Maine. That's an often overlooked way to get familiar with mapping is pick a small town in rural America. They desperately need it and

you can map a small town with a very short time. Lisa from Mississippi shared that I participate as a hobby because I love mapping and to map for the hot tasks because they are listed as priorities which I find useful. Ian, like the people back in Minnesota,

like the people in Minnesota, mapping in Minnesota is quiet. But check out the ball of America. It is bopping. We're starting an open map time chapter in Duluth. Come join us, says Zach. Also, Duluth is beautiful. Sorry. Arlo shared be careful to check

your editor software's upload settings. Two contributors in a co-mapping session found hundreds of untagged nodes in a rural area. They were able to be used as the basis for productive mapping in a manner similar to following a GPS trace but the original labor of the uploader and tagging had been lost to a dropped connection. Flaky internets.

And Austin from South Carolina shared that I started a few years ago from mapping my neighborhood, then town and county. That's the way it works. You go out in concentric circles, right? We worked with local government and have used tools like the hot task manager and Microsoft buildings to great results. Good. And have been all the while working on processes to keep the data fresh. We're really proud of it. OSM went from the worst

road map to the best. And there's Austin's diary entry there. So this is a smattering of observations that we've had during the course of the conference and each one of these tells a little bit about, gives us a little bit of insight into what we

need to do to be responsive to our membership and to you but it's also good, it's a good fodder for ideas for moving forward. So with that, I turn it over to Min and we'll engage with question and answer time. Alright, so Stephen just broke the number

one rule of PowerPoints which is that you don't read quotes off a slide. Sorry. So I'm going to try to recover the mood in the room by having you all participate. And I've got several questions here that you actually have to answer. The first one is, and so please raise your hand

if you identify with one of these questions. We will not be taking names, so don't worry. I have edited an open street map, so raise your hand if you've edited an open street map. Awesome. Yes, we're actually going to go out and

take some follow-up questions, or yeah, ask some follow-up questions of folks who responded. So raise your hands back up if you've edited an open street map. Alright, so alright, so let's see. Pick someone here. Yeah, alright.

Okay, okay, you're a guinea pig. Hello. Alright, so you've edited an open street map. I have. What was the last thing you edited? The Mall of America, actually. So the Mall of America looks pretty boppin', I've got to say. And most of the POIs in there are linked to brand Wikidata, but there are a few that are not, such as that

Haagen-Dazs that I was showing off in my presentation, so I did it. Alright, so I'm going to follow up real quick. How many of you have edited an open street map today? Alright, cool. Thanks for your dedication.

Editing during a conference. Even with our internet connection here, okay. Let's see, number two. I have cleaned up a tiger mess. Alright, we're going, let's see, find somebody.

Find somebody. Tiger mess. Yes. Can you describe the tiger mess? The tiger mess was some rural Wisconsin roads around where my parents live. Cool. How did you fix it? Yeah. How did you fix the mess?

Just using the aerial imagery. It was pretty straightforward, and I knew that the aerial imagery was current. Good on you for doing that. And this is an example we can all follow. Let's see. I have taught someone else to map. How many of you have done that? Fix someone.

So, I run a number of Meetup groups and I also work at an academic library, so I try to let students know OSM exists.

Awesome. This is sort of related. I have tried to explain OSM to family and friends. I know we asked that earlier, but I just want to, you know, we want to follow up on that now. Alright. Okay. So, yes?

Mostly my mom still thinks I'm a geologist. I've got to try that one.

So, I organize an event in my town. How many folks have organized events? Alright. Alright. These are very dedicated OSMers here. Alright. I'm from Guinea. It's not just an event

you know, in a year, I organize a lot of training in my city, sometime beyond my city. So, I do it a lot of time. Thank you for doing that.

We asked this earlier. I am a member of OSMUS.

Hi. I'm sad to say that I joined up to get tickets for this. We hope you will find it a worthwhile investment. Glad to hear it. So, related to that, I am a member of OSMF, the OpenStreetMap Foundation, the international one. Alright. We have some there.

Do you want to find someone? Hi. Can you talk about why you joined? Let's see. I have been attending the international conferences for quite some time and thought it would be good to join the foundation just to get more insight

of how it's run, who's in charge, and some of the issues that they have to deal with, and also being allowed to vote in the board elections. Yep. So, just to clarify to everyone, there's two foundations, the OSMUS and OSMF, and

you can be a member of both. And finally, stand up if you are at this conference. Alright. Stretch. Alright.

Now, sit down if you are not at State of the Map US 2018. So, stay standing if you were at that conference in 2018. Alright. Alright. Oh, yeah. 2018 in Denver.

Sorry. Detroit. The other D. Sorry. Detroit. Okay. Now, stay standing if you were at State of the Map 2017 in Boulder, Colorado. Yep. Stay standing if you

were at State of the Map 2016 in Seattle. Sorry. Seattle. It's late. Alright. Okay. We have a few diehards here. How about State of the Map 2015 in New York City? Sorry? I can't hear you. Sorry.

2015 was at the UN.

Alright. So, folks who have been at State of the Map 2014 actually predate me. Anyone at State of the Map 2014? Alright. Yeah. I got to sit down. Okay. 2013? Anybody? 2013. When was 2013?

2014. San Francisco. And 2012? That was the Portland. Okay. Alright. Wow. Should we keep on going? Alright.

2011. So, that was Denver. Alright. Yeah. Who is still Alright. Okay. Alright. Alright. So, that was 2011. Alright.

Alright. 2010. Atlanta, Georgia. The first one we held. 65 people there. Alright. I think we have a winner. Jim. You get the microphone.

Anything you want to do with it. Speech. I think that OpenStreetMap is really cool. And back in when it started, it really started

at WearCamp. The second WearCamp is where we kind of pulled this together. It was Thea, Kate, and Serge who got together to form an organization to build this. And that was back in the days of Cloudmade when they were out trying to pull people in. And I guess

that's how I got pulled into this. Cloudmade, I read something in the newspaper that Cloudmade came to Boston and ran a mapping party. And I was just like, that's so cool. I totally want to go to that. Why don't these things exist? So, I looked it up and I saw in two weeks there was one in New York City. So, I got my bicycle.

I threw it on a bus. Took it to New York. And I biked around all of mostly around Central Park. And I added all the roads in Central Park and started adding a lot of stuff in Manhattan. And that was before we had aerial imagery or anything you could add to the map. So, you just had to have a GPS and you maybe went around

twice on your bike and you added into the map. And there was a big push to get people who mapped a whole lot to come out to WearCamp so we could get everybody together and really try to start building something in America out of this. Because before that it was mostly European. And it was really cool and I really

liked open source data and mapping and I thought it was a great fit. And I've been coming back and I'm glad that these two people up here as well have been here the whole time. So, I'd like to hear what they have to say.

Thanks Jimmy for letting me put you on the spot there. I think the next thing we have on our schedule is to throw things open for questions and statements. So, I've been asking you a lot of questions.

We're in the hot seat and this is your chance to ask questions and to converse our comments or for anything for our executive director or for any of us board members. Alyssa and Jonah have microphones and they're running around so if you have a question for any of us

or for the board or for Maggie in general please raise your hand and we'll be happy to field your questions. Even if they're about licensing, we'll take them. Yeah, some experts.

I'll be quick. What is the number one priority for the board and executive director for the next year? So, for the board, it's going to be super easy. It's supporting Maggie, but I think it really is

whatever we're trying to grow the community and to advocate for OpenStreetMap in the U.S. and to me at least and I think we've talked about it a bunch, but I think in general that means growing the community. The number of people at State of the Map U.S., the number of events happening, all of the things

more of that. I'm going to second all of that. Yeah, I think the first step is community engagement. Getting everyone really excited about the future of the map and then reaching out to new communities, finding new people, finding new populations, but yeah

more strategic facilitation of volunteer efforts to build community. I have just one brief observation. I think I'll be selfish here. I am an organizer for TeachOSM for those of you who don't know and it may not be the number

one priority for the board and for Maggie, but one of the high priorities for us as a project is to train the next generation of mappers. We have how many edits a day? Whenever it was a million edits a day. We have five billion nodes. We have five million

registered users and as the largest publicly available worldwide database, I think we need to be training the next group of mappers to follow in our footsteps. Alan? I think it would be nice at this conference next year to get to know who lives near us at home.

I'd like to know who's here from Massachusetts if anybody, but maybe a map with our names on it of the United States because here's a good place to meet people that might live down the street from you who just never met them and they never communicated. Hey Eric, how hard would it be to print a big 8x10 foot poster of the map of the world?

For tomorrow. I think that's a great idea, Alan. It would be cool if we could pull that off quickly. We have to just figure out how to print it, but even next year for sure. Yeah, that's a good idea. Other questions?

He's from Massachusetts. So we'll take statements and then if there's none, then

oh yeah? What should somebody do if they're interested in helping out you guys? Tell me.

And I'll figure out, we can figure out what the best fit is for you to help. So reach out. Maggie Maps on Twitter. Maggie Maps on Slack. You see a trend here. I'm easy to find. And so are these people behind me.

And I think you can also email us. Team at OpenStreetMap.us That will go to all of us and one of us will direct you in the right place. I think Maggie talked a lot about some specific things earlier. So like committees, basically

we have a bunch of projects that we want to get done and that we've all talked about and have heard from the community and it would be great to be able to appoint people who are excited about working at those things at those projects. So I think people power is where we're missing right now. And so getting people who are

excited enough to come here and travel and talk about this stuff to work together on that kind of thing would be great. We have a lot of needs, I think, that span a lot of different areas. I'm thinking specifically like communications, like data quality.

There's a lot of bits and pieces of projects around the Teach OSM, for example. There's a lot of things that we can, places to plug in. So I think if you're interested in plugging into the project, it would be good if you send us an email message and tell us what you're interested in, what kind of skills that you have to learn the project, we can kind of route things and help

organize the kind of task-oriented committee or working group or whatever we need to attack it.

I'm going to make it ugly. Not ugly. I don't know what the word is. But I'm actually curious what OSMUS's budget is. Where does the money come and where does it go?

And then maybe the follow-up is what would you do if you had more? Sorry, can you say that again? I was arguing. So what's your budget? Sort of where does it come from and where does it go? Roughly speaking. And then what would you do if you had more? Yeah, so I'm the treasurer and I'm happy to be the treasurer. Our budget is roughly

well, we have like $200,000 in the bank. The vast majority of the money that we spend and that we take in is related to this event. We make, sorry, our intake for this event is on the order of

$150,000 and our expense for this event is on the order of $100,000. This is all, you could search for our name on guidestar.com and see our form 990s if you'd like to double check my math because I don't actually

know it off the top of my head right now. But that's the order of magnitude for money. If we, what do we spend it on? We, sorry, we spend it on this event but we also spend it on things like programs, your local mapping groups.

If you have a local mapping group, we will pay for food so that you can run your mapping party and not feel bad about paying for pizza. We will, we have travel grants so if you're driving somewhere to talk about open street map to like a local conference or something, we'll pay for

your travel. What else am I forgetting? Oh yeah, we have a server it's a little bit aged right now but we have a server that's running and we have resources at like Amazon and whatnot that if you have a technical project in mind that you want to work

on, we have some resources available to let you play around with that. We also are able to connect you with folks who can maybe make that easier. Again, kind of like I said before, we have we have the resources to help you, we just don't have the people power to do it. So if you have something in mind that you want to play with on open street map

data or if you have some exciting project that is almost there but just doesn't have a server to run on let us know. And if we had more money I think we would try to spend it on people

I think. As in we would hire more people. And more events. That's Maggie's job, she should talk about that. This is my list. So I'll just add that historically, like I said in the talk open street map us was originally founded to run state of map us. So that has been our funding structure for nine years.

And to me if we are going to grow as an organization it has to change substantially. So doing annual giving programs, changing up our membership program and going after some grants to fund specific programs and projects such as teach OSM. More events some infrastructure to support local groups and potentially some

new tooling to welcome new mappers. I think we can all come up with five or six ideas for that money too. So I think there's a lot of things in the future that we'd really like to accomplish if we had a bigger budget. And it would be great to have someone to work with on my team to hire as well. Yeah and I would just like to add

if you have ideas of what you like to do with more money or you should look for more money. I mean if you have ideas come speak to us. I mean it is definitely an important part of our work and the sustainability of this work.

So looking ahead to state of the map us 2020. Do you have any announcements to make or any thoughts

on if people are here interested in hosting is there, what do we do? We did put out a call for proposals and we got some. We're still considering what to do. Next year is a milestone year for the organization. It's going to be our 10th birthday.

And we've heard some feedback about changing up the way we hold events, having more events or different regional events. So right now we're taking different options into consideration. But as always if you have an idea we'd love to hear it. But no announcements yet. If you have an idea for where

you're in a group that are excited to try to pull something like this off, sorry not to try, to pull something like this off, please do let us know because it's all about

the people and it makes it a lot easier when there's an excited group of folks at the place with the ideas and the local knowledge to make it better or to make it run well. We can schedule it for the next five years. Other questions?

Comments? Mr. Van Exel. We've had a few cycles in the past where there's

not been a lot of candidates to choose from for board seats. So what are you doing to get more people interested in running for the board and shake things up a little bit maybe? I don't know if that's needed. Get new people interested in being in your place also. I've personally

badgered a lot of people to run for the board. New faces, diverse faces, all kinds of people. We need new faces. That's a great sound. Yeah I think an important thing for me to think about is that

the board to me is just a bunch of volunteers that spend a whole bunch of time on this and it would be great if you are excited about OpenStreetMap to, it's a very small step to go from thinking a whole lot about OpenStreetMap, whether it's part of your job or it's just a thing that you do

on the side or you're just really excited about it. It's a very small step to go from that to running for the board of OpenStreetMap US or OpenStreetMap Foundation and being able to direct money and make suggestions

that kind of lead to change in the community and it's a very small step. It's really just putting your name on the wiki and saying that you're excited and kind of describing why you're excited. These are all things that if you're excited about OpenStreetMap

it's just a paragraph of words saying what's in your head. So that's all a very you're a very small step away from making a huge impact on OpenStreetMap if you're in that position and I encourage everybody who feels like they have that one little step to

try to do that. It sounds like a whole lot of work. It sounds like you're in a really, like we're in a really important position but we're really just like you guys and we just happen to have been elected by other folks so I encourage everybody to do that.

And if I may circle back to Martijn's question like one of the learnings that I've seen today is looking at our map and our tools and how we can make them all of it more accessible and understandable to like a range of different types of people that are interested in the map

so we're talking about user interface for example that this matters and I think part of what we're trying to do in as we enter our tween years in OpenStreetMap US is making it clearer for everyone about how we can participate

and that includes like what does membership look like and what does it afford as well as what is the process of becoming a board member. I think a lot of times historically OpenStreetMap both US and the large organization has been

obfuscated you know by lots of different things and so we're looking for I think accessibility and clarity and look forward to more people running more places for events

you know more types of connections etc. like that. I had a couple, well I just wanted before we leave I was wondering if there were any announcements that were potentially like related to OpenStreetMap or OpenGeo community

that others in the room might be interested to know about. This lovely woman here has one so go ahead. State of the Map Africa will be hosted in November in Ivory Coast and it will be hosted the weekend before Thanksgiving so I know all of you

are free so make sure to attend. It's also co-hosted on the first day with Understanding Risk which is a conference about risk communication and understanding disaster risk management. There will be people from government and practitioners in the field so looking forward to seeing you all there.

Any other events that we should book our tickets to? If you're in the Seattle area or interested in being in the Seattle area in mid-October, Cougos

the local OpenGeo chapter has their big annual event and still looking for speakers. The deadline is September 13th. I'll put something in the OSMUS Slack link.

That's it? I believe it's sometime third week in November, geography awareness week we also co-brand that is OSMGeo week and a week full of mapathons and mapping where if you

did see Jennings stats it's usually a high point of the year so look for more information on social media about that and if you are able it's a good time to host an event wherever you live. If you do have an event

be sure to put it on the OpenStreetMap calendar. If you don't know how to do that you can ask me and I'll help you with that because that way it also ends up in the weekly OSM newsletter and it gets more attention so that's always a good thing and I think it's a little easier now than it was six months ago even so but if you need help

I'm here for you. Another state of the map is in November in Wellington, New Zealand if you need a reason to go around the other side of the world. Great if you think of something

there we go. What is the US lower case C chapter doing at State of the Map International? Are you getting together? How are you represented there at that meeting? Which I know many of us have never been to.

I'm attending the conference. When I sign up I'm not doing official talk but I am going to meet some other groups and I have some meetings set up with the foundation and just trying to build some bridges with other local communities and

what else can I say about that? Yeah just really starting to build relationships as well. I think we have a lot to share with emerging OpenStreetMap communities and I look forward to being able to share everything that we build here in the US with anyone who wants it.

I was just curious about is the OSM US Slack run officially by the organization or is that just kind of an independent thing?

Yeah so he's asking about the OpenStreetMap US Slack and that is maintained and run by the board, the organization and you are all welcome to join. You can join, basically you invite yourself

at slack.openstreetmap.us and there's a pretty good, there's roughly 200 active people there everyday chatting about OpenStreetMap it's not limited to just US stuff if you want to talk about development of software or you have tagging questions

or what not, it's a good resource for real time communication there's other options as well like IRC or the forum or that sort of thing but Slack is a pretty active place and pretty friendly as well. If I could offer some feedback that maybe in the future

maybe migrating to a platform is a little more open maybe that allows people to view the conversations that are happening without being logged in, without creating a separate account maybe something like riot.im or something along the line Yeah that's good feedback and we've heard that so the feedback is that Slack you have to sign in

and it's not open source and that's at the time that the OpenStreetMap US Slack was set up Slack was really the best out there in terms of collaboration and especially with the non-profit discount that we have which lets us do search

it is not Google-able but it's searchable forever if you want it to be inside Slack there's other platforms now that have kind of become more open and work almost as good as Slack and so we can think about that in the future but right now we have such a lot of momentum

on that Slack that it's kind of hard to change so we can talk about it as a community for sure. Any other questions? And I would say even like any observations from this weekend that we as a board executive director should walk away with

would be helpful. I think that is a really good segue into our like we have a short list of announcements here, one of which is that we'll be sending out a feedback form immediately after like probably on Monday we'll send it out so your brain

is fresh and still thinking about this we'll send that out to the email that you use for tickets so keep that in mind and look out for that A lot of the stuff that we're doing or that we did this year things like captioning and childcare the food, the way that the events were being handled

or the talks were handled, that's all kind of reinforced by the feedback that you all give so that's important Alright, the videos will be posted on YouTube as soon as possible, we will send out that link on your

emails as well and we'll also post it on Twitter and Slack and Facebook and Telegram and all the places that we can communicate We're not finished yet we still have tomorrow, sessions start at 9 and we will definitely have lunch as well so the space closes at 2

so if there's any last minute meetings you wanted to have or birds of the feather please try to fit as much as you want into the day. We will be doing a community survey over the next month to help inform the strategic planning process so look for that and if you are okay with it I'll send it to the email

that you shared when you signed up for this event, if you don't want me to do that let me know. Look for an upcoming event, we're going to try to do quarterly hackathons or mapathons in different parts of the country the next one will be for OSMG a week in November and if you're interested in participating and hosting something in your town or being a part of that collaboration

please reach out. For tonight, check the social board for some activities or if you have something in mind just shout it out there, there's sharpies and things there too if you just want to put it up there that would be great.

For tomorrow, if any of you are flying out in the next couple of days, the airport is under construction so you might want to give it a little more time and there's also a football game tomorrow and I believe that the public transportation goes through that light rail stop where the stadium is so that could be very exciting. Anything else I missed here?

I think that's it. Great, thank you for a wonderful day I look forward to tomorrow.