OSM UK Directors’ Report 2023/24

OpenStreetMap UK CIC 2024, agm

OSM UK is constituted as a Community Interest Company, registered with Companies House in the UK. The Board of Directors is responsible for the management of the Company and the furtherance of its objectives, as set out in the Articles of Association: https://osmuk.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/UKOSM_Articles.pdf .

For 2023/24, Jonathan Harley, Stephen Holt and CJ Malone continued as Directors from the previous year. At the 2023 AGM, Gareth Ling and Robert Whittaker were re-elected and elected (respectively) as Directors.

Company Membership and Administration

  • The Board has held monthly virtual board meetings throughout the year. These are generally open to members to observe, and occasionally outside speakers are invited. Full details of the meetings can be found in the minutes, which are available online at https://osmuk.org/members/governance/minutes/ . Members can email board@osmuk.org if they are interested in attending any future meetings.

At the time of writing, membership of OSM UK stands at around 100 individuals and 7 corporate members. For 2023/24, membership fees remained at £5 per year for individuals, £50 (SMEs and non-profits) or £500 for corporate members.

  • The Board runs the OSM UK website at https://osmuk.org/ , and has taken care of routine maintenance of this and the membership management software.
  • The Board has also considered the new Companies House legislation, but this should have little practical effect on day-to-day operations of the Company.

Activities to support the UK Mapping Community

OSM UK’s objectives include improving the data in OSM and supporting the UK mapping community. Various OSM UK activities have contributed to these objectives.

  • The Board has continued to support the UK Quarterly Projects through selecting topics to focus on and promoting the projects each month. The topics chosen over the past year have been:
    •   2023 Q4: Places of Worship and Cemeteries
    •   2024 Q1: Fixmes and Notes
    •   2024 Q2: Defibrillators
    •   2024 Q3: Stale Data

Full details can be found online at https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/UK_Quarterly_Project .

  • We requested the creation of a UK section on the OSM Community Forum at https://community.openstreetmap.org/ . Some of our directors and other members of the community were accepted as moderators for the new forum. The forum seems to be well-used now, with more activity than either the Talk-GB mailing list and our old Loomio forum. As a result, we’re proposing a vote at the AGM on shutting down the Loomio site that we run.
  • We suggested that Geofabrik set up a whole-UK tag-info instance on https://taginfo.geofabrik.de/ . Previously, there were only instances for Great Britain, and a combined Ireland and Northern Ireland. We now have separate instances for the UK, Scotland, Wales and various English counties.
  • We started hosting “Online Mapping Chat” meetings for the UK community, once a month on a Monday evening. Some of these meetings were focused on specific topics or presentations from invited speakers, while others were more open/general. Details are posted in the OSM Calendar at https://osmcal.org/ , and publicized in a Community Forum thread at https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/osm-uk-online-chat/111763 .
  • OSM UK continues to provide a rendering of the UK Land Registry index polygons as a tile layer to help mappers align aerial imagery. The tiles have not been updated for a few years, and this is on our list to do in the near future. For details of the service see https://osmuk.org/cadastral-parcels/ .

Working with external organizations to help them use and/or or contribute OSM data

OSM’s objectives include promotion of the use of OSM data by third parties, and the release of third-party data for use in OSM. As well as fielding several enquiries and queries from third parties, OSM UK members have been involved in the following:

  • Member Jez Nicolson and Director Robert Whittaker have continued to provide informal guidance to the National Trust around their ongoing work to improve the mapping of their properties in OpenStreetMap.
  • Director Robert Whitaker has had informal conversations with the British Heart Foundation around their national database of Defibrillators, “The Circuit”. We have got permission to add the UUID ref’s for each AED in the The Circuit to OSM to aid matching between the two datasets. Robert’s tool at https://osm.mathmos.net/defib/ flag discrepancies between The Circuit and OSM, and has identified some issues that have been fed back to the team running The Circuit.

Outreach events and promotion of OSM to wider audiences

General outreach and advocacy contributes to several of OSM UK’s objectives, including increasing the size of the editor community, promoting the use of OSM data, and promoting the release of third-party data for use in OSM.

  • Director Gareth Ling was interviewed by researchers at TU/Delft towards the end of 2023.
  • Member Jez Nicolson has agreed to give a talk about OSM for the Coventry branch of the British Computer Society later in 2024.