User:Mashin/US Board Election 2022

Hi, my name is Martin Machyna and I've been contributing to OSM since 2009 under a nickname Mashin. I am based in Connecticut where I've done tons of work on improving accuracy of the local roads and rivers data, doing local surveys and I spent past year and a half working on CT-wide buildings and address points import. Professionally, I work as a molecular biologist analyzing large scale sequencing data and looking for new ways for visualizing the results. I love exploring and playing with large datasets and I immediately fell in love with geospatial data and possibilities it has to offer. I am also an avid hiker and you can often find me with my Garmin GPS in hand while recording unmapped trails or mapping their surroundings. Apart from that, I was also involved in a project to unify world-wide tagging of river areas and reservoirs and I started maintaining Changelog wiki page to keep track of recent changes in approved tagging standards.

My thoughts on OSMUS
OSM US community for me is an active, vibrant and inclusive place, where I always like to go to exchange ideas or just read what others have found while mapping in their part of the country. This community has already gave rise to many great ideas and initiatives and I would like it to not only continue, but also to become a role model for the whole OSM. I think OSM US has just the right amount of enthusiasm and boldness to be able to push OSM from its petrified state to a new era.

My thoughts on OSM

• OSM has grown up from its infancy stage and has proven itself as a viable and extremely useful project. However, we also have to look into future. Self-diving cars will need detailed maps of our streets, delivery drones will need accurate 3D model of high-rise buildings to safely navigate to their destination. We should make sure we are ready to provide such data when the time comes.
• OSM is primarily an open data project. To fulfill our mission in distributing free worldwide geospatial data to public, we should use any and as many different technologies that will allow us to efficiently do so (opensource or proprietary).
• Companies/corporations are not our adversaries. Wherever we can, we should try to set up a partner collaborations and use their resources to help our mission.
• “Any tag you like” concept is an important part of OSM community mechanisms and should continue be in use. However, as the project has moved to its mature stage and we began to map complex features, we should be resorting to well prepared and discussed tagging proposals as much as possible. This way we can ensure that the proposed tagging model is the best possible for a given feature and encompasses the majority of variations in different parts of the world.
• I think that the best way how to reach a community consensus and avoid never-ending disputes is through a community-wide vote. If we can vote for board members, we can vote for other things as well.
• We should strive to keep our data as consistent as possible across all countries/communities. No one wants to work with messy or unpredictable data.
• OSM should actively support its own ecosystem and not just hope that developers will be maintaining critical code/projects by themselves forever.