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Strategic Plan Outline: Difference between revisions
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The OpenStreetMap project is unique in its global diffusion of crowdsourced data collection, distributed responsibility for data quality control, and diversity of its community, ranging from individual volunteer mappers contributing highly specific local knowledge to large corporations contributing satellite imagery and artificial intelligence tools. It is unusual in its fostering of a commercial ecosystem that provides hundreds of jobs side by side with empowerment of localised civil society, small and medium businesses, and humanitarian organisations.
The project and its community seek not growth per se, but rather data quality, consisting of accurate and ever broader, deeper, and more detailed geographic coverage of its database, meanwhile ensuring that this database will remain free of charge and free to use, to allow anyone, anywhere, to create a “map of the world that anyone can use”. As a result of this philosophy, however, growth has found OpenStreetMap, and demand for its data now
The OpenStreetMap Foundation (OSMF) supports but does not control the OpenStreetMap (OSM) project. It is responsible for ensuring that the project has what is necessary not only to survive but to thrive well into the future. This responsibility calls for creation of a strategy for dealing with the demand growth thrust upon the project while simultaneously preserving the core philosophy that has made OSM such a success: focus on local knowledge and distributed intelligence; on empowering volunteer mappers; on providing tools mappers need to collect, enter, and check quality of data; on cross-border and cross-cultural collaboration; and on volunteer working groups.
A limit on growth of expenditures on administration of the project is also core to OSM’s philosophy: we often hear the refrain that OSM should not become another opaque and inaccessible bureaucracy-heavy NGO, with large paid staff. Adherence to this core philosophy will ensure that OSM remains a free project, independent from influential donors. By empowering volunteers rather than staff, it will also remain a vibrant project that attracts enthusiastic contributors, because it will remain fun as well as useful – and we volunteer contributors, at the end of the day, are why OSM is today the success story that it is.
= Key Inputs and Process =
A strategic plan is a big undertaking. Our approach is to set high-level directions across all the efforts and structures of the Foundation, and then to take a phased approached to develop more specific ideas and determine details of plans. To start we will focus on technical planning.
== Demand Growth Forecast 2020–2025 ==
Working with SSRE and OWG, we shall develop a range (low/medium/high) of OpenStreetMap platform services growth projections in 1-, 3-, and 5-year timelines. Determining implications for hardware, hosting, software and workload will feed our financial planning.
* Implications for hardware, software, and workload
So, we now have two complementary definitions:
* Technical core: rock bottom, without which OpenStreetMap disappears. Mostly the database and its API.
* Functional Core: The Mapping Process.
Part of the OpenStreetMap Foundation’s mission is to ensure that there is at least one fully Free and Open Source Software path to complete the OpenStreetMap mapping process. Decisions about what software to support will follow directly from this.
== Scope bounding ==
* *The Foundation is established for the purposes listed below:
**(1) encouraging the growth, development, and distribution of free geospatial data; and
**(2) providing geospatial data for anybody to use and share.*
* What definitely falls within the OpenStreetMap Foundation’s mission?
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