Governing Board Candidates

[wipfli]

The Governing Board elections will take place online on Thursday, August 25th, 2022 which coincides in time with FOSS4G.

Candidates for the Governing Board can nominate themselves up to two weeks before the election, i.e., until Thursday, August 11th, 2022 by posting in this thread that they are interested in serving on the Board. Please include a description of your involvement in the MapLibre Project and disclose if you are paid for working on MapLibre or have a vested interested in the Project.

[HarelM]

Hi everyone!
My name is Harel Mazor and I would like to nominate myself for the Governing Board.
I'm currently maintaining maplibre-gl-js (You might have seen some of my annoying comments if you have submitted a PR there :-)).
I'm working on an open source hobby project called Israel Hiking Map (co-founder) which is a small navigation app that uses Cordova and thus maplibre-gl-js to allow outdoor activities in Israel (hiking, biking, 4wd driving, running etc...).
I've been attending every steering committee meeting since the first time I joined after adding the addProtocol capabilities to maplibre-gl-js.
I've pushed forward the typescript migration along with the modernization of the maplibre-gl-js stack, and helped with the 3D terrain effort.
I generally enjoy participating in open source projects from the development side of things.
I'm currently employed at Dell as a group leader and previously done roles as a team leader and architect in the Semi-conductor industry.
Feel free to check out my linked-in profile here:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/harel-mazor-1298b139/
The project site here:
https://israelhiking.osm.org.il/
Or the project code here:
https://github.com/IsraelHikingMap/Site

Thanks! :-)

[lseelenbinder]

Hi all!

I'm Luke Seelenbinder, and it'd be my pleasure to have the opportunity to continue serving on the governing board.

As part of the founding group, I strongly believe that open-source map rendering libraries are valuable for the ecosystem (from individuals to large organizations), and that's why I initially led (along with my fearless fellow founding members) the push to ensure there was a single, vendor-neutral, and community-led fork of Mapbox GL JS, and I'm really excited to see the community and engagement grow over the last year+. So far, I've been most involved in the background, from Twitter-spamming at the beginning to build an initial group, to helping build the organizational charter, talking to sponsors, writing organizational docs and presentations, and ensuring we have a solid foundation for the future, etc.

If you choose to reelect me, I hope to achieve the following over the next term:

• Finalize the organization structure while supporting a governing board culture and habits that ensure it will succeed long-term
• See MapLibre GL Native become a much healthier project with near parity to GL JS
• Foster the continued development of MapLibre RS, a prototype of a future, unified cross-platform renderer

I use MapLibre projects daily via my company. Both personally and professionally, I see a lot of potential as the community continues to mature and collaborate.

Here's to the strong future of MapLibre! 🚀

[nyurik]

I would like to nominate myself to the board of MapLibre. I feel it is important to show what I did so far, and explain how I see MapLibre's future. I have served on the board since MapLibre inception, so here it goes...

• I kick-started MapLibre via a Twitter post. There are some good replies including the one from MapBox CEO just eight minutes after my initial tweet...
• Created MapLibre GitHub organization, set up OpenCollective banking and distributed donations acting as the organization treasurer
• Coordinated and worked on initial code rebranding, CI work, and initial NPM publishing, lots of work on charter (thanks Oliver for drafting it!), ...
• Presented MapLibre at conferences like State of the Map US and the upcoming FOSS4G
• Engaged in numerous coordination and sponsorship talks with organizations like OSM board, Amazon, Meta (FB), Microsoft, and others, including those at the conferences. The recent large donation from Meta, and hopefully a few more upcoming ones are due in part to the SOTM-US conference hallway talks.
• Convinced several important repositories to join MapLibre: MapLibre-RS, Martin, mbtileserver-rs, and hopefully soon -- Planetiler.
• As a developer, I mostly hack on the backend tooling like Martin - the tile server framework that should eventually serve from PG, mbtiles, and other formats, as well as support server side rendering.

Going forward, here is my vision and how I see my role...

• Listen to the community. Mediate between the needs of all contributors and supporters, large and small. Make sure we all align on the roadmap of the projects, both near and long term.
• Make sure MapLibre stays independent from any one company, and provides value to everyone who wants to do maps.
• I think MapLibre should supply the whole stack of features for developers, to go from the raw data like OSM and Natural Earth to the interactive map in a browser or apps. This means MapLibre should encourage innovation at all levels of the stack, provide tools to create and serve tiles, engage with new standards for 3D, projections, globe to flat zooms, experiment with joining native and javascript stacks (e.g. try Rust web assemblies), ... . The more interesting ideas we try, the more likely we will find the good ones bringing even more value (and fun) to everyone involved.
• No money for the board - I believe it would create too much conflict of interest if the board is allowed to decide on money allocation, and later turn around and receive that money. We all should decide for ourselves - do we want to represent the community and steer the projects forward, or do we want to receive payments for our efforts? I feel having both may put too much power in too few hands.

Your suggestions and feedback are welcome of course :)