About me

I started mapping in June 2020 as a way to find parks and trails near my home in Redmond, Washington. My daughter loves adventures and provides huge motivation. I am a software engineer by trade and from that bring my passion for great tools. I love being able to work with others on a project that is expansive, vivid, and important.

My mapping

I have found mapping to be rewarding. My profile lists the projects that I’m most proud of. Most recently, I completed a review and addition of 150,000 addresses to fill out the greater Indianapolis area.

Much of my mapping is done in direct collaboration with other mappers. Organizing on the OSM US Slack instance and taking advantage of the OSM US Tasking Manager has been a huge boon for me. I know my contribution has been much greater and of better quality because of these resources. I’m quite active in the various OSM chat channels, so please say hello!

I’ve given back to the community by writing diary entries about leveraging the wide range of OSM tooling to multiply your impact. Either by better visualizing areas that need work, workflows to do work faster, or using old data in new ways.

Goals as a board member

Great organizing makes contributing easier and more engaging. The OSM US Slack, message board, Task Manager, etc. are great resources and their maintenance, curation, and expansion is critical. You’re much more likely to have a mapper add their 1000th change if they’re helped and encouraged along the way.

I believe the most successful map is the one we ALL build together. Harmonizing competing interests and misunderstandings is definitely a challenge, but one that is worthy of our attention. The board cannot solve all issues and disputes but they are in a unique position to listen and coordinate.

The map is great but the map tomorrow will be even better. There’s a lot to love about what has been built here but we should continue to look for ways to accelerate our priority of “maximizing the impact and value of OpenStreetMap and our community”. We must identify places where the map is not meeting this goal, and more importantly, the specific things OSM US can facilitate to unblock and encourage our passionate mapping community.

Some projects I will be working on this year to achieve a better map:

• Continue adding data from the National Address Database in areas that have low address density
• Find and curate novel datasets to improve the POI density
• The cleanup and harmonization of tags from old imports of giant datasets (GNIS, TIGER, NHD)

Most of all, I love to collaborate with and support the goals of other mappers. I’m still relatively new to the community which means I have lots to learn and lots of folks to learn from. The board exists to help YOU so I expect to do a lot of listening!