Future of the OpenStreetMap Foundation

Room: Workshops I - Amphi Navier or Picard (Carnot)

Sunday, 09:30
Duration: 60 minutes (plus Q&A)

Language: en

This event will not be recorded.

• Roland Olbricht

The OpenStreetMap Foundation owns the OpenStreetMap hardware and trademarks. It uses money to keep the platform running.

The Foundation sees the positive impact of current paid work, but has not yet to funds to sustain all that activity. In this workshop we ask the attendants as members of the OpenStreetMap community for advice how to raise the funds.

The OpenStreetMap Foundation support but does not control OpenStreetMap. It is the legal entity that owns the hardware and holds the copyrights and trademarks for OpenStreetMap.

The Foundation nowadays not only employs a Senior Site Reliability Engineer to fend off cyber attacks and AI backscatter, but also funds the development of vector tiles and iD. In last year and this year, the support of the Sovereign Tech Fund also enabled to realize a lot of development from the website’s backlog.

However, the income of the Foundation does not yet sustain all these tasks. In this workshop we ask the attendants as members of the OpenStreetMap community what sources of income the Foundation ideally should have and what measures it shall or at least may take. Shall we really ask our mappers although they volunteer already with time? Is this tenable still when it is recurring yearly? How much money do we want or accept from a single large donor before the influence is too big? Or shall we try the infamous Wikipedia style banners? Even if our actual users sit behind third party apps and never see the openstreetmap.org website?